“Having new voices in the House is always a good thing,” says NDP MP Libby Davies, who has served more than 17 years in Ottawa.

On that basic principle, the veteran New Democrat might be commended for making way in Vancouver East when she retires this year. Davies is one of 41 incumbents who have so far declared they will step away when the federal election is called. Among them are several rookies, but also veteran MPs, such as Conservatives Diane Ablonczy and Joe Preston, New Democrats Yvon Godin and Joe Comartin, and Liberal Irwin Cotler—MPs whose experience and knowledge Parliament will be without come this fall. In fact, pending further retirements and electoral defeats, the next House of Commons might have only 20 MPs whose time in office dates back as far as the 1990s.

Of course, the occupation of member of Parliament is not a particularly stable kind of employment. But in Canada, MPs come and go at a particularly brisk pace.

A 2004 study authored by political science professors Richard Matland and Donley Studlar found that Canada had the lowest mean rate of return for incumbents among a survey of 25 democracies. An analysis compiled by scholar Ned Franks found a turnover rate of 37 per cent in elections between 1945 and 2008, while a 2008 survey of the 39th Parliament by the Public Policy Forum found our parliamentarians were less experienced than those in the United States and Britain. Indeed, the average time in office for a British MP elected in 2010 was approximately eight years and 10 months, a figure at the start of a new Parliament there that is higher than the average time of service any Canadian Parliament has ever managed by the end of its term.

The current number of departing incumbents is not particularly high, but the 2015 election will also introduce 30 new seats. There have also been 15 by-elections since the 2011 election—higher than in recent Parliaments—and two more by-elections could be called before the general election. And those changes follow a 2011 vote that produced 108 new MPs. That election four years ago seemed to herald dramatic change, but it was actually the 15th federal election to produce 90 or more rookie MPs (not counting the vote in 1867)—and most of those rookies were elected when the House of Commons had fewer seats than it does now.

The implications for the functioning of Parliament can be debated; a democracy must be open to change, but Parliament also benefits from the experience that veteran MPs can bring to the debate. “MPs are never more deferential or more sycophantic than when they first arrive in Ottawa—eager to please, most susceptible to indoctrination,” laments Independent MP Brent Rathgeber, a critic of partisan influence.

Even if newcomers aren’t led astray somehow, they still likely have a lot to learn, even as they try to do the job—from matters of public policy to managing a constituency office to the intricacies of parliamentary work. “I still have a lot more to learn,” says Ted Hsu, the Liberal MP for Kingston and the Islands for the last three years, who has chosen to step away at the next election. “I still don’t recognize a lot of the other MPs. I can’t remember who’s the chair of what committee.”

Even if a newcomer does seek re-election, the time between figuring most of it all out and leaving might be relatively short. There is also something to be said for institutional memory. “When there’s a higher turnover, you lose that kind of memory and you have people [for whom] what they see is what they think it is: They don’t have that longer-term context of what a Parliament is about as an institution,” says Davies.

Even if the perfect mix of new voices and old hands could be identified, it might be difficult to manufacture. Britain’s MPs have benefited from a large number of safe seats (where the incumbent is considered a heavy favourite), something Canada might not want to encourage. A 2011 study by professors Kelly Blidook and Matthew Kerby found MPs who came to Ottawa to “make a difference” were more likely to step away voluntarily, so perhaps MPs would be more likely to stay if they were further empowered.

The parliamentary schedule might be better organized to accommodate MPs with families and those who have longer distances to travel to return to their ridings. Better training at the outset might also shorten the learning curve for new MPs. “If you think of the private sector of even [non-governmental organizations], I think there’s much more training and resources in what you’re dealing with,” says Davies.

This year’s election might not match the massive change of 1993, when 199 of 295 seats were won by first-time MPs. But if current polling trends hold, change in the next Parliament will greatly exceed those 71 open seats, and a change in government could easily push the total number of newcomers past 100. Partisans might cheer those changes, but perhaps change is not unquestionably a good thing.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/what-to-do-with-all-the-new-in-the-house-of-commons/feed/0Mother, daughter could wind up side by side on the 2015 ballothttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/mother-daughter-could-wind-up-side-by-side-on-the-2015-ballot/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/mother-daughter-could-wind-up-side-by-side-on-the-2015-ballot/#commentsMon, 01 Dec 2014 10:10:22 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=645857Lori Baldwin-Sands has been acclaimed as the Liberal candidate in Elgin-Middlesex-London – her daughter, Catharine Sloan, has a shot at the Conservative nomination

]]>OTTAWA – For voters in the area around St. Thomas, Ont., who might be weary of mean, nasty, personal campaigns that are short on substance, next year’s federal election might just hold a pleasant surprise.

Municipal politician Lori Baldwin-Sands has been acclaimed as the Liberal candidate in Elgin-Middlesex-London. Her daughter, financial-sector worker Catharine Sloan, has a shot at the Conservative nomination coming up on Dec. 6.

Little chance here of the campaigns going negative. Mother and daughter say they are committed to fighting it out on the issues.

“People can learn from us, mother and daughter, that we are both strong, independent, we have our own voice, and we really focus on the issues themselves,” said Baldwin-Sands.

Added Sloan: “For me, politics is about issues, it’s not about attacking anyone’s personality or any one individual. I think that we would have a clean campaign because it would be focused on the issues.”

Sloan comes to the Conservative nomination fight with a high-profile list of backers, including cabinet minister Pierre Poilievre and Maxime Bernier.

She worked for Poilievre and for Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird on Parliament Hill, before taking a job as a protocol officer at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Later, she was a civilian support worker for the Canadian Forces base in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Now an adviser at a bank in the riding, Sloan said politics comes up at the family dinner table. There’s obviously a strong difference of opinion.

“It’s something that we’re constantly talking about, but we just don’t agree on the right direction forward for our country,” said Sloan, one of three sisters.

“She’s a Justin Trudeau Liberal, and I think that Stephen Harper’s trusted record with the economy and his record on keeping taxes low and creating an environment for business has weathered us through the financial recession.”

Baldwin-Sands ran for the provincial Liberals in the 2011 election, losing to the Conservatives by 8,700 votes. Federally, outgoing Conservative MP Joe Preston won the riding in 2011 – over the second-place NDP candidate – by more than 16,000 votes.

Seven people are competing for the Conservative nomination, while Baldwin-Sands was acclaimed to represent the Liberals. Still, she says the Liberals have a shot this time.

St. Thomas had been hit hard by the recession, with one major manufacturer after another closing its doors over the years.

“When I talk to residents about some of their traditional voting for the Conservative representative, they tell me they are tired of waiting – they supported the Conservatives in the past hoping for a better economy,” said Baldwin-Sands.

“Now they have empty rental apartments, service businesses that are suffering, and many stores there without customers. People are ready for a Liberal government because they invest in communities.”

On election night, would either drive over to support the other in the case of a clear Liberal or Conservative win? Neither woman has reflected on that just yet.

“My parents raised me and my sisters to be independent thinkers, and they always taught us to be active in our community,” said Sloan.

“I don’t think she was surprised when I told her, but it just leads to interesting conversations.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/mother-daughter-could-wind-up-side-by-side-on-the-2015-ballot/feed/1So, Justin, when are we getting that back rub?http://www.macleans.ca/authors/scott-feschuk/so-when-are-we-getting-that-back-rub/
http://www.macleans.ca/authors/scott-feschuk/so-when-are-we-getting-that-back-rub/#commentsFri, 26 Sep 2014 02:20:29 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=614221The parties can try all the slogans they want—we’re waiting for Trudeau’s firm hands

Only a year remains until the next federal election campaign—and each of the parties has been test-driving a slogan designed to increase its appeal. Let’s take a closer look:

New Democrats: “Change That’s Ready.” The NDP has had enough of being ignored, OK? They’re the official Opposition! They’ve got close to 100 seats in the House! Their leader offers Canadians the intelligence of an academic and the beard of a guitar teacher! And yet the media and the public pay far more attention to He Whose Hair Must Not Be Mussed.

The party’s new slogan attempts to position Thomas Mulcair as the most prepared alternative to Stephen Harper. It is being reinforced by Mulcair’s own musings in the public realm. Most recently, he’s been heard accusing his Liberal rival of having no policies, no solutions and no ideas—to which an irate Justin Trudeau has replied: [winks and offers Canada a back rub].

I’m kidding, of course. Trudeau actually has a whole bunch of policies. Would you be interested in hearing about them during your back rub, Canada?

It’s important to understand something else about the NDP: They are about more than slogans. They are also about trying to coax us into referring to their leader as Tom Mulcair. It’s always Tom this and Tom that. They’re trying so hard to make their leader seem relatable that it’s only a matter of time until they play the Tommy card. Hey look, kids: it’s Tommy MC! The ensuing ad is almost certain to include a puppy, two selfies and a hacky sack.

The impulse is understandable, but let’s face it: He’s just not a Tom. In fact, if there were a more formal version of Thomas, that’s what we’d be calling Thomas Mulcair. There’d be people across Canada saying: “Sure, I like the NDP’s message—but I just can’t connect with Thomaseth.”

Conservatives: “Better Off With Harper.” Strategically, this slogan aligns with the party’s longstanding argument that Canada is a great country and an enviable economic power that would immediately collapse into chaos and return to the barter system should Stephen Harper be defeated.

But the casual use of the Prime Minister’s surname is a little strange, no? Do you think there’s a single Conservative staffer who refers to the PM as “Harper?” I bet that even in their dreams, they address him as “Sir,” “Mr. Prime Minister” or “Stephen of the House Harper, first of his name.” (Game of Thrones-themed dreams only.)

Plus, it is perhaps worthy of mention that the expression “better off with” is most frequently used in reference to the choice between two unpalatable options: Well, last time, the burritos gave me the runs, so I guess I’m better off with the enchiladas. Not exactly an image to rally a political base.

Then again, the Conservatives are raising enough money that they’re on the verge of moving beyond the need for slogans. Give the poindexters at Conservative Labs another few months and they’ll be able to beam Harper talking points directly into our subconscious—like a U2 album into our iTunes. One day, we’ll just wake up with unfamiliar new opinions about the unemployed and corduroy.

Liberals: “Justin Trudeau—Getting Ready to Lead.” There are two ways to read this slogan. Here’s one way: “A confident Trudeau fully expects to become PM and is preparing tirelessly to bring real change to Canada.” Many, however, have been reading it the other way: “Justin Trudeau is not currently ready to lead—but he’s totally going to buckle down and possibly go to night school. Check back with us in a few months, OK?”

Under this interpretation, the slogan leaves unanswered the question of how long “getting ready” will take. Will Trudeau study on weekends? Will he enlist a cool mentor like Mr. Miyagi or Patches O’Houlihan? Is there a climactic test of some kind like in the Harry Potter books? Only after you navigate the Hedge Maze of Legislative Procedure shall you truly be ready to lead, my child.

That said, there are signs that Trudeau is getting a little closer to being ready. One recent ad included a photo of him sitting at a desk looking all leader-like and doing some paperwork. It was probably just a receipt so we can all file a workplace insurance claim for that back rub, but it’s a start.

Scott Feschuk’s new book, The Future and Why We Should Avoid It, comes out in October and is available for pre-order here and here.

]]>Canadian politicians inundate us with election ads, pamphlets and lawn signs. For that, we can thank the more than 500,000 voters who open their wallets to donate to political parties. Here, Maclean’s examines the five postal codes that have given the most to federal politicians. (The results include individual donations of $200 or more between 2007-10, excluding the most recent federal election in May 2011.)

1. V2A 5C5 (Penticton, B.C.): $210,857
Canada’s most generous postal code leads to an address on Main Street in Penticton, but in reality comes from a single donation to the New Democrats by the estate of a long-time supporter. Ruth Millicent Hass, who lived in nearby Kaleden, B.C., died at age 89 in April 2010 and bequeathed the single largest donation to any political party in at least 15 years. The riding is represented by Conservative Dan Albas.

2. K1A 0A6 (Ottawa): $136,064
Not surprisingly, this is the postal code for Parliament Hill, and the majority of the money raised came from MPs themselves. New Democrats donated the most—$106,000—to their own campaigns using their Parliament Hill address (which is represented by their own Paul Dewar), with Liberals kicking in $23,000 and Conservatives just $6,500.

3. M5K 1J7 (Toronto): $76,200
This postal code is for a Bay Street office tower in downtown Toronto that houses the headquarters of accounting firm Ernst & Young. All of the donations went to the Liberals and came from current and past employees of the company, primarily in 2008. Nonetheless, the NDP’s Olivia Chow represents the riding.

4. L0S 1J0 (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.) $62,860
The upscale retirement community in southwestern Ontario was among the most generous political donors. Residents here gave $40,000 to the Conservatives, $17,000 to the Liberals and $2,700 to the NDP. Their cash clearly helped: the town elected long-time Conservative MP and current Justice Minister Rob Nicholson.

5. K0L 2H0 (Lakefield, Ont.): $61,495
The tiny summer cottage community of Lakefield, in the Kawartha Lakes, houses Lakefield College, the exclusive private school that has educated the likes of Prince Andrew. Donors here gave $35,000 to the Liberals and $21,000 to the Conservatives. Despite the disparity in cash support, the riding has elected Conservative Dean Del Mastro three times.

Source: Elections Canada

Have you ever wondered which cities have the most bars, smokers, absentee workers and people searching for love? What about how Canada compares to the world in terms of the size of its military, the size of our houses and the number of cars we own? The nswers to all those questions, and many more, can be found in the first ever Maclean’s Book of Lists.

Buy your copy of the Maclean’s Book of Lists at the newsstand or order online now.

]]>OTTAWA – The robocalls court challenge took a testy turn Wednesday over the tweets and treatment of one of its star witnesses.

Conservative party lawyer Arthur Hamilton cried foul after pollster Frank Graves — asked to leave the courtroom so lawyers could confer with the judge — examined the Twitter feeds of journalists who were tweeting from inside.

Hamilton produced screen shots from Graves’s own Twitter feed to prove he’d been snooping on the courtroom chat.

“He did. Hehe,” Graves wrote to someone who asked if he checked Twitter from outside the courtroom.

But the social-media mischief did not amuse Hamilton.

“This is not a light matter,” the Conservative lawyer said.

Steven Shrybman, who represents the eight Canadians who are challenging the election results in their six ridings, shot back, taking Hamilton to task for his treatment of Graves during a cross-examination.

Hamilton aggressively grilled Graves, of Ekos Research, earlier this week over his past donations to the federal Liberals and inconsistencies in prior court affidavits submitted as part of the case.

He was trying to call into question the credibility of Graves as a key witness in the legal bid to overturn Conservative victories in the six closely contested ridings.

Shrybman accused Hamilton of crossing the line and abusing the judicial process.

“I can’t imagine a more egregious form of character assassination,” Shrybman said.

“What there was, was taking almost an hour of this court’s time to allow Mr. Hamilton a platform to assail Mr. Graves’ integrity because — the assertion is — that he didn’t remember the precise nature of a political contribution that he made six years ago.”

Federal Court Judge Richard Mosley decided the Twitter incident does not preclude Graves from being a witness, although he cautioned it may colour how he views the pollster’s evidence.

“I do not consider that this incident is a matter that would lead me to disqualify Mr. Graves as an expert witness,” Mosley said.

“I will have to consider whether it affects the weight I will give to his evidence if I conclude that evidence is admissible.”

The heated exchange was the highlight of the third day of the robocalls court challenge, which delved deeply into the legal minutiae surrounding the admissibility of an Ekos report as evidence in the proceedings.

The Ekos report is central to the court case, in which eight people are trying to overturn results in six ridings over allegations that misleading or harassing phone calls kept some people from voting and may have affected the outcome.

The group’s legal bills are being paid by the left-leaning Council of Canadians.

]]>OTTAWA – Lawyers for eight Canadians challenging the outcomes of the last federal election in six closely contested ridings are in Federal Court today arguing that the results should be overturned because of alleged voter-suppression tactics.

The eight voters, who are supported by the Council of Canadians, allege misleading or harassing phone calls in those ridings — all won by Conservative candidates — kept some people from voting and may have affected the results.

The Conservative party says it was not behind the fraudulent calls.

Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton argued the case is frivolous, saying the eight applicants are really just stand-ins for the left-leaning council.

“There are simply too many pieces of evidence which point to the fact that the Council of Canadians is the real applicant here,” Hamilton told the court.

He told judge Richard Mosley the group stands to benefit financially and politically from the Federal Court case, regardless of the outcome. The council has solicited donations on its website to support its advocacy work on the back of the so-called robocalls affair. The lawyer said the group is using the case to build a database to use for future fundraising.

“There is a financial windfall to the Council of Canadians,” Hamilton said. “They are raising money with respect to this application,” .

The case began by dealing with Hamilton’s “champerty and maintenance” motion. Champerty refers to the process by which a third party shares the proceeds of a lawsuit with a party to the suit, while maintenance refers to meddling in another person’s lawsuit for personal gain.

This afternoon, the court is scheduled to hear from pollster Frank Graves, who prepared a report suggesting the fraudulent or misleading calls were widespread across Canada during the last federal election.

Over the course of the next five days of scheduled hearings, Tory lawyers will ask the court to dismiss each of the applications. They will argue the council has no bona fide witnesses who could testify that they actually were dissuaded from casting a ballot because of the calls.

None of the eight applicants actually failed to vote in the 2011 election as a result of the alleged tactics.

“It is increasingly apparent that this is a political activist campaign masquerading as a lawsuit — a left-wing group is seeking to overturn democratic elections because it doesn’t like how people voted,” Conservative party spokesman Fred DeLorey said in an email.

But Garry Neil of the Council of Canadians dismissed the Conservative argument, saying lawyers for the applicants will only need to show the calls were made — and therefore sullied the electoral process — and not that those calls actually tricked anyone, for the results to be overturned.

“We’re pretty confident that, first of all, we don’t really have to demonstrate that,” Neil said. “Because if we can simply demonstrate that fraudulent calling was really widespread, then the argument will be that that has compromised the very integrity of the electoral process and that should be the end of the story.

“If the integrity of the process is compromised, then the judge ought to just throw out the results and order that byelections be called.”

The six ridings in question are Vancouver Island North; Yukon; Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar; Elmwood-Transcona and Winnipeg South Centre in Manitoba; and Nipissing-Timiskaming in Ontario.

Getting the election results overturned in those ridings would appear to be a tall order, if the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the case of Conservative MP Ted Opitz is any indication. The court upheld Opitz’s close-fought 2011 election win in his Toronto riding despite proven procedural problems.

The Federal Court case is parallel to — and unsupported by — an ongoing Elections Canada investigation into fraudulent robocalls, stemming from complaints that have surfaced in 56 ridings across the country.

The agency’s investigation has centred on the southwestern Ontario riding of Guelph, where a number of residents say they received automated phone calls from someone claiming to be from Elections Canada and directing them to a wrong or non-existent polling station.

Among the complaints contained in court documents are accounts of rude calls, calls in the middle of the night, swearing and even a mysterious message from North Dakota.

While the misleading phone calls appeared to target non-Conservative voters, the Conservative party insists it had no involvement in any such scheme and says it is assisting the investigation.

A shadowy operative known only as “Pierre Poutine” is believed to be behind the calls. However, Elections Canada has not yet been able to find that person.

Canadians were rightly alarmed earlier this year when details of a secretive figure named Pierre Poutine first came to light. Using an auto-dialing service in Quebec, an anonymous partisan operative allegedly sent voters identified as non-Conservatives to the wrong polling stations during the 2011 federal election. But while the so-called “robocall affair” exposed the underbelly of today’s political campaigns, it also opened a door into a world where political parties exploit our ever-growing webs of personal data.

Mobilizing your supporters and discouraging your opponents, the bread and butter of any election campaign, was once a matter of recruiting enough volunteers to canvass neighbourhoods and drive people to the polls. These days, it’s increasingly the work of data analysts and behavioural scientists who collect reams of publicly available personal information and use computer algorithms to exploit it. Their goal: nothing short of pinpointing the fears and hopes that motivate individual voters, and using that information to target them for donations and votes on election day.

How you vote may seem like the last bastion of individual agency, but political campaigns say they can predict what messages will move you with unnerving accuracy by studying everything from your home address, to your magazine subscriptions, to what you like to watch on TV on a Saturday night—or even whether or not you own a TV in the first place. Dubbed “microtargeting,” these new techniques promise to have profound implications for the political process. “The idea of Pierre Poutine, it was funny,” says Carleton University professor and former Reform party pollster André Turcotte. “But the real story is in what parties are doing and not doing with their data and about how that technique is hijacking the political process.”

Nowhere is this emerging field of data mining more advanced than south of the border, where political campaigns are investing millions to hire consultants and buy individualized consumer databases that track fishing licences, people’s web-browsing history and credit card transactions. Barack Obama’s presidential re-election campaign reportedly has more than a dozen data analysts, including a “chief scientist” whose previous job was mining consumer data for private sector clients. The Obama campaign’s latest technological innovation is an algorithm that searches for patterns in voters’ written submissions to the campaign’s website. They call it “microlistening,” and while the Democrats have been quiet about exactly how their algorithm works, they say it has the ability to make predictions about someone’s voting behaviour based on the words they use to talk about such things as unemployment and the economy. In theory, if one person were to write on the campaign website about the “socialist” 2009 auto bailout, while someone else used terms like “saving jobs” or “sacrifice,” the algorithm could predict which person is likely to vote Republican, and which one is worth targeting for donations or a follow-up to make sure they’re on the registered voters list.

In fact, American political parties now collect thousands of identifying details to develop individual profiles of the nearly 175 million registered voters in the U.S., along with profiles on millions of unregistered voters to decide whether it’s worth spending money to encourage them to vote. U.S. voter registration lists already provide the basic information—names, addresses, voter turnout histories and, in some states, birthdates, race and ethnicity. On top of that, parties add in the voting history of your registered poll to decide whether your neighbourhood tends to always vote for one party. More recently, parties have been purchasing consumer data collected in private, for-profit data warehouses. If you’ve ever filled out a warranty form, entered a sweepstakes, filled out a customer-service questionnaire, subscribed to a magazine or taken a cruise, that information can be purchased by American political campaigns to develop your voter profile.

Campaigns then use computer algorithms programmed to weigh the relative importance of each piece of individual information and calculate a series of “probabilities” about you: a 72 per cent chance you’ll cast a ballot and a 49 per cent chance that you’ll support Obama.

The key to data mining, say experts, is the crucial demographic detail buried in the sheer volume of available consumer data. On its own, knowing that you took a Hawaiian cruise last September doesn’t necessarily say much about what you might think of Obama’s health care reform. But knowing that you take three cruises a year might suggest that you have a fair bit of disposable income. Couple that with data that says you earn between $50,000-60,000 a year, have children, voted in every election for the last 15 years and live in a neighbourhood that swings between Democrat and Republican, and suddenly you’re seen as a prime target for a political message about tax breaks for the middle class. “There’s an assumption that when you have a thousand data points about an individual, many of them related to their past political behaviour, you can start to make informed predictions about [how they’ll vote], even if they’re not upfront about that with you or with themselves,” says Sasha Issenberg, a journalist who spent the last few years researching the data-mining techniques of U.S. campaigns for a new book, The Victory Lab.

By the time a politician knocks on your door, he may know more about you than most of your friends do, says Issenberg. It’s allowed campaigns to make informed predictions about how you might vote before you think you have even made up your mind. The parties can then target you by phone, mail or email with a message best suited to you—one that might be different than the message sent to your neighbour.

In using such tactics, political parties are borrowing from the corporate world, which has been successfully collecting and mining data on its customers for years. Retailing giant Target employs 50 data analysts who, by examining subtle shifts in the buying habits of female customers, can predict with startling accuracy which women are pregnant, down to their due date. Meanwhile, companies like Google and Hewlett-Packard analyze data on their employees to figure out which ones are most likely to quit in the future—potentially even before the employees themselves decide it’s time to go.

Former Columbia University computer scientist Eric Siegel, an expert in the emerging field of predictive analytics, says data-mining has helped uncover all sorts of behavioural trends, from the fact that fans of Rihanna are likely to vote Democrat, to the revelation that vegetarians are less likely than meat-eaters to miss a flight. “Data is a tremendously rich resource because it’s encoding what’s happened in the past and so you’re literally learning from experience,” he says. “It enables you to make a prediction rather than a guess.”

In Canada, campaign spending limits and privacy laws mean parties have less access to the expensive private consultants and warehouses of consumer data that have become central to American politics. But that doesn’t mean parties here aren’t diligently building vast databases on individuals that can be used to solicit for donations and mobilize voters on election day.

Parties regularly scan obituaries to weed out deceased voters and scrutinize letters to the editor to flag voters who are passionate enough about certain issues to write to their local newspaper. They use networks of volunteers to canvass neighbourhoods and call voters, and hire pollsters to conduct detailed daily polls measuring the impact of an attack ad or a campaign promise. But where those political volunteers were once armed with pens and clipboards, they now have mobile apps to record the answers you give at the door and feed them into centralized databases.

Need a ride to the polls? Care about health care more than the economy? Want a lawn sign? All of that is recorded next to the barcode assigned to each individual voter. “If you write a letter to a political party or show up at an event or register your opinion in some form or another, they can track you,” says journalist Susan Delacourt, who has researched the marketing techniques parties use during elections for a book, Shopping for Votes, due out in March. “If I’ve somehow communicated with the Liberal party that my cable bill is bugging me, they can log that. It’s just this rolling database of contact and information and anything else they can accumulate.”

For instance, parties could use the information they’ve gathered to contact voters for telephone town halls on issues believed to be important to them. Once you’re on the phone, the party will track how long you stay connected as a measure of how engaged you are with the campaign and the core issues. Increasingly they’re also tracking the words you may use during question-and-answer sessions and monitoring them for keywords that will indicate your views.

Already, the Liberal database tracks about 150 different voter issues, says Delacourt. It has room to log 260 different answers to questions beyond just “yes” and “no” and can tell a volunteer before they even pick up the phone whether a voter has already hung up on past canvassers, or whether they spent 20 minutes talking about their passion for the environment.

Capitalizing on the growing demand for data on voters, private sector firms are rushing to help parties sort through the mountain of personal information Canadians post about themselves on the Internet. Pitney Bowes sells software that can analyze a database of voter names to automatically detect gender and ethnicity. New Brunswick’s Radian6, now owned by U.S. cloud-computing service Salesforce, can track everyone on Twitter who has retweeted a message from a party or politician. Say someone isn’t a member of the NDP, but always retweets a candidate’s messages around the party’s platform on poverty. That information can be logged to identify the voter and then target him for a traditional membership drive by promoting the party’s platform on poverty reduction.

The company also uses software to determine whether someone is writing positively or negatively about a certain issue, say, the Keystone pipeline or a tax cut for small business. It offers its “sentiment analysis” in seven languages.

At the same time, Environics Analytics’ Prizm database has crunched reams of demographic data from Statistics Canada, consumer surveys, and existing Environics research to sort Canadians into 66 “lifestyle groups” based on their postal code. The company also breaks down federal ridings into 87 different “social value” attributes.

The pictures of voters that emerge from this can be unnervingly specific. The Prizm database can tell parties, for example, that voters in the Davenport riding in Toronto tend to be less interested in nature than the average Canadian, are much more skeptical toward both big and small business, and place a higher importance on physical beauty. Coupled with details on individual voters, the company says its data-crunching resources allow parties to identify the lifestyle preferences and value systems of their most dedicated supporters, and then identify postal codes with similar demographics to target for votes or donations. “It’s about trying to understand the voter,” says Rupen Seoni, vice-president of Environics Analytics. “You’re peeling back the onion.”

Another favourite of Canadian political data miners is the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement, which tracks people’s TV, radio and media consumption by postal code and can help parties target their limited advertising budgets. The NDP gathered data on where Canadians paid the highest cellphone rates and then targeted those voters for a campaign promise to cap cell charges.

“If someone reads Field and Stream they’ll probably be a hunter and a Conservative,” says Delacourt. “So if they know where all the Field and Stream voters are, they can send them cards on gun control.”

Among the ways the bureau tracks media habits is through a “portable people meter,” a small pager-like device that detects inaudible codes broadcasters embed into television shows and radio, along with advertising in movie theatres and in-store entertainment. While the information gathered is anonymous, it can signal that a male in his 20s who works in manufacturing in Toronto regularly listens to a particular radio station at 3:15 p.m. on Tuesdays. That can be hugely helpful for parties looking for the right radio station to advertise a campaign promise aimed at young working-class men.

The next frontier in microtargeting is services that match the offline data parties collect on voters with their online behaviour. Private companies now offer services that can match cookies—small text files that the websites you visit store on your web browser—to names and email addresses stored in political databases. “If you want to send an ad to women in Missouri with an Obama support score between 40 to 60 per cent, you can take that category of names, go to a network of [Internet] sites and tell them for the next week if any of these people come to your site, show them this ad and don’t show it to them more than five times,” says Issenberg.

Despite its popularity among political campaigns, microtargeting has its share of skeptics. Conservative strategist and University of Calgary professor Tom Flanagan says the focus on microtargeting is overblown. “Yes, there are sometimes special letters that go out when some issue is in the news. You may know from your identification records that there’s a certain number of people who respond to an appeal related to gun control,” he says. “But that’s a kind of sideline. Most of the money is raised just by asking people to give because it’s the party they support.”

Even so, the growing use of technology to identify and target voters has alarmed federal privacy advocates. Both Elections Canada’s chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand and the federal privacy commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, have raised serious concerns about high-tech political campaigns, which are neither government departments nor private corporations and therefore aren’t covered by existing privacy rules governing what information can be collected and whether it must be disclosed.

“I can go to the Bay and demand to see all the information they have on me and I can go to Revenue Canada and demand to see all the information they have on me,” says Delacourt. “I can’t do that with the Liberals.”

Parties argue that their data analysis makes governments more responsive to the electorate, their policies more grassroots. But it also means they focus on the interests of only a small slice of the population since they can accurately identify whom those swing voters are and where to find them. Out of 23 million eligible voters, says Carleton University’s Turcotte, the Conservative voter-tracking software enabled the party to identify just 500,000 that could hand them a majority.

It’s at least partly responsible for the rise of election campaigns full of niche issues that may be important to groups of targeted voters, but short on national vision. “It’s hard to deliver on vision, but it’s easier to deliver on practical, specific policies,” says Turcotte.

That trend was thrown into stark relief last month, when Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s office sent a mass email promoting the government’s support for gay refugees from Iran. The email addresses of the recipients had been gathered from a petition they had signed on the site Change.org supporting gay refugees, which was sent to Kenney’s office.

Some were outraged, suggesting the goverment could be tracking their sexual orientation. Others were simply outraged that the government was trying to pick them off as single-issue voters. Either way, all got the message that signing an online petition had landed them in the database of at least one federal political party, if not all of them. Such stories conjure up images of political operatives hidden away in a dark room somewhere in Ottawa trolling the Internet for lists of Canadians. But in a future where technology can help peel back the curtain at the ballot box, that image may not be far from the truth.

Watch Patrick Tucker, deputy editor of The Futurist, on how our personal data will be used to explain not just who we are but who we’ll become:

And here’s Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, on how society will grapple with the coming data revolution:

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/elect-big-brother/feed/3Newsmakers of the Year: neo-NDPershttp://www.macleans.ca/news/lets-get-this-party-started-2/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/lets-get-this-party-started-2/#commentsThu, 01 Dec 2011 16:45:01 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/12/08/let%e2%80%99s-get-this-party-started/When the NDP won an unprecedented 103 seats in the federal election, an eclectic cast of unknowns was thrust into the spotlight

If all had gone according to plan, the NDP candidate in the riding of Berthier-Maskinonge would have been noted little beyond the historical record. She would have been nothing more than an entry on the ballot that the majority of voters in that riding passed over as they marked an X beside the name of the incumbent, Guy André of the Bloc Québécois, or perhaps the Liberal candidate, Francine Gaudet, a former member of the national assembly of Quebec.

But then the polls changed and Ruth Ellen Brosseau became an example of democratic absurdity. And then our political hierarchy changed and Brosseau became a duly elected member of Parliament.

A single mother living in Gatineau, Que.—several hours by car from Berthier-Maskinonge—Brosseau worked as the assistant manager at a university campus pub in Ottawa. She did not speak French fluently and had possibly never set foot in the riding she was nominally running to represent. Midway through the campaign she went to Las Vegas on vacation. But her name was on the ballot. And a week after her 27th birthday she received 22,403 votes, nearly 6,000 more than André.

The NDP’s previous record for seats won in Quebec in a single election was one. On May 2, they claimed 59 seats in the province. Nationally, the party had never managed more than 43. This spring it won 103. Swept up in such change was an eclectic cast of unlikely MPs—a horticulturist, a karate instructor and various students, including 19-year-old Pierre-Luc Dusseault, the youngest individual ever elected to the House of Commons. And in the immediate aftermath of the vote, Brosseau became a convenient—and, it must be said, photogenic—symbol of so much happenstance.

By the only measure that matters—the number of people willing to mark an X beside their respective names—they are all winners. Some might be likened to lottery winners, but a lucky ticket holder is not instantly invested with so much responsibility and power. And so, however they got here, it now only matters what they will do with this opportunity.

They have already changed the face of the House of Commons. There are now some 19 MPs under the age of 30. Thirteen of those MPs are women. That, in the first place, challenges our idea of what a politician is supposed to look like. They may yet change the way we practise or perceive politics or what we expect of young people. Some might one day be cabinet ministers. One or two of them might end up as prime minister. But it is early days. The under-30 set are conscious of the opportunity to represent their generation on issues like student debt and youth unemployment, but they have constituents now and they are parliamentarians, with everything that entails.

Brosseau has stood in the House to pontificate on the regulation of cosmetic contact lenses and acknowledge the local buckwheat pancake festival. She has seconded a private member’s bill that would allow those in service industries to claim tips for the purposes of employment insurance. And one afternoon in September she loaned her voice to the daily shaming of Tony Clement. “Mr. Speaker, as a single mother, I have very busy days,” she told the House. “Between helping my son with his homework, making meals, rushing to drop him off at school, going to the office and returning to pick him up on time, the last thing I want is to hear about the mismanagement of public funds at the G8 summit.”

So Brosseau is now very much a member of Parliament. And we have a very different kind of Parliament. One that may ultimately redeem itself, whatever the oddity of its creation.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/lets-get-this-party-started-2/feed/0Is election of students another sign MPs are faceless?http://www.macleans.ca/education/university/quebec-sending-9-university-students-to-parliament/
http://www.macleans.ca/education/university/quebec-sending-9-university-students-to-parliament/#commentsFri, 06 May 2011 03:46:24 +0000http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/?p=25834Young MPs will be under the microscope

]]>When Parliament resumes, the NDP’s Quebec delegation will include some of the youngest MPs ever elected.

On Monday night, Quebecers elected nine of the 11 university students running as NDP candidates in the province. At least two other new NDP MPs from Quebec are recentgraduates.

Among the students is Canada’s youngest MP ever, Pierre-Luc Dusseault, an applied politics student at Université de Sherbrooke.

It definitely seems as though campaigning was optional for NDP candidates in Quebec. Charmaine Borg, one of several McGill students elected, didn’t speak to the local paper in Terrebonne-Blainville, the riding she represents, until election night. She spent most of the campaign in Montreal, helping out with Thomas Mulcair’s reelection effort.

She’s not the only young NDP MP coming under scrutiny, Isabelle Morin, a Université de Sherbrooke student who was elected in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-Lachine, did her first interview with the Montreal Gazette on Tuesday. She told the paper that she had, in fact, been campaigning door-to-door in the riding and that, despite earlier reports, she could speak English, an important skill for the representative of a largely anglophone riding.

I probably don’t even need to mention the most infamous of the new NDP MPs, Ruth Ellen Brosseau, the Vegas-vacationing Ottawa bartender who still hasn’t spoken to any media.

The high level of scrutiny these MPs are under probably won’t be letting up soon, media here in Quebec will be watching to see if these new representatives open offices in their ridings and, in some cases, as they meet their constituents for the first time.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about this new crop of MPs.

I’m glad that ordinary young Canadians are taking seats in Parliament. I think that many of these young MPs will end up impressing people. Dusseault, in particular, has proven himself to be quite articulate. Even though most of these new MPs did not expect to win, all of them are engaged with, and clearly active in, Canadian politics, otherwise they would not have stood for election in the first place.

But I am concerned about what the election of these MPs says about the state of our system. None of these candidates were elected because of who they are, their record or their experience. No, they were elected because of the party they represent and that party’s leader.

To me, this is just another sign that MPs have become faceless, interchangeable representatives of their parties, rather than local individuals who represent their communities. There’s a reason we vote for candidates, not for parties or leaders.

Also, I’m a little jealous of these new MPs. They’ll all be looking at annual salaries of over $150,000 for, at least, the next four years.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/education/university/quebec-sending-9-university-students-to-parliament/feed/2NDP surge in Quebec could put students into officehttp://www.macleans.ca/education/university/ndp-surge-in-quebec-could-put-students-into-office/
http://www.macleans.ca/education/university/ndp-surge-in-quebec-could-put-students-into-office/#commentsSun, 01 May 2011 01:45:40 +0000http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/?p=2567810 university students standing as NDP candidates in Quebec

]]>When Thomas Mulcair became the second NDP candidate ever to be elected in Quebec, it had far more to do with his personal popularity than with his party’s.

Mulciar had been the environment minister in Jean Charest’s cabinet and publicly disagreed with the premier on a plan to sell part of a provincial park. When he was demoted, he resigned. Standing up for his convictions may have hurt Mulcair’s career in Quebec City but it certainly didn’t hurt him at the federal ballot box.

Coming into this election, the NDP had its eyes on gaining a couple more seats in Quebec, but had no serious hopes of a massive breakthrough. As a result, in many ridings, the NDP has been willing to standanyone with a pulse who wants to run. They’re placeholder candidates, whose only purpose is to ensure that the party’s name is on every ballot in the country.

But, with polls showing surprisingly strong for the NDP in Quebec, it caused a stir when one of the candidates took off for Vegas and when the party was unable to tell reporters if another candidate was still planning to take a vacation of her own. There have also been concerns that many of the candidates don’t live in their ridings and haven’t been campaigning.

Interestingly, 10 of the NDP candidates in Quebec are university students and two of them have a pretty good chance of being elected.

Some seatprojections are putting Isabelle Morin, a student at Bishop’s University, in the lead in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce–Lachine. The western Montreal riding, which includes urban and suburban areas, has been considered a safe Liberal seat. Current MP Marlene Jennings has never received less than 40 per cent of the vote since she was elected in 1997.

The same seat projections are also suggesting that Elaine Michaud, a masters student at Quebec’s École nationale d’administration publique, could win in the riding of Portneuf–Jacques-Cartier. The suburban riding, which surrounds much of Quebec City, is currently held by André Arthur, an independent who usually votes with the Conservatives.

While I’m not sure how much I trust riding-by-riding seat projections, it doesn’t look like some of the student candidates have much of a chance.

Some of them, like Charmaine Borg, who is standing in the riding of Terrebonne-Blainville, don’t seem to be campaigning at all. A local newspaper in the riding couldn’t even get in contact with her. Borg is the co-president of the NDP club at McGill. The other co-president, Matthew Dubé, is standing in the riding of Chambly-Borduas, just east of Montreal.

Others, like Pierre-Luc Dusseault, look like they’re actuallytrying to get elected. Dusseault, who is standing in the riding of Sherbrooke, is an applied politics student at Université de Sherbrooke.

Laurin Liu, standing in Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, north-west of Montreal, has some electoral experience, she was recently elected as one of the undergraduate representatives on the board of McGill’s campus radio station, CKUT.

If some of these students do get elected, it won’t be the first time Quebec has put a student in to the House of Commons. The youngest MP elected in 2008 was the Bloc Québécois’ Nicolas Dufour, who was 21 at the time. The youngest MP ever was also elected in Quebec; Claude-André Lachance, a Liberal, was 20 when he was elected in Montreal. Luachance got his law degree while he was a sitting MP.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/education/university/ndp-surge-in-quebec-could-put-students-into-office/feed/1Stop shaming young people to votehttp://www.macleans.ca/education/university/stop-shaming-young-people-to-vote/
http://www.macleans.ca/education/university/stop-shaming-young-people-to-vote/#commentsSat, 23 Apr 2011 06:03:34 +0000http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/?p=25412Ultimately, the decision to vote should be a personal one

]]>The other night I participated in an organized group discussion about the youth vote and upcoming federal election. (Doesn’t that sound riveting?) As part of the event, participants were asked to indicate to the group if they plan on voting, and if so, who they plan on supporting. Among the crowd was a group of brave souls who, feeling disengaged and disenfranchised, declared their intention to stay home on May 2. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “ZOMG, someone, save them!” “Others are dying for this TYPE OF DEMOCRACY!”

I was beginning to believe “Not Voting” was some sort of communicable disease by the way these individuals were avoided that night. It was mostly leers and whispers until the microphone made its way around and self-appointed democracy-advocates made their impassioned pleas to the misguided. “You’re ruining it for everyone!” they said. “Don’t be politically lazy!” “We are the future!” “Gaaahh!”

Of course, the vomit was slowly rising in my throat by that point. Most upsetting was that I generally agreed with the voting advocates (minus the starry-eyed optimism). I think young people should vote, especially since it’s clear politicians won’t pay greater attention to the concerns of youth until they’re convinced they can rely on their votes. Young people can make the change by voting. I was incredibly dismayed, however, by the tone of the individuals who chose to unleash verbal attacks on the non-voters. They were convinced that the deliberate choice to refrain from voting was a disgraceful one and something certainly worthy of indignation.

It’s not surprising that this election has given rise to that sort of sentiment. Over the past few weeks, young people have been the target of pundit pleas, messages from TV personalities, and campus pressure to participate in vote mobs. And while the messages have largely been positive–encouraging youth to exercise their democratic right to cast a ballot—the latent effect has been to make a taboo of the equally democratic right to not cast a ballot. It seems focus on getting young people out to the polls has demonized the decision to stay home.

The reasons cited for choosing not to vote are usually the same among young people. They either don’t care enough to vote, they feel they aren’t well informed enough to vote, or else are so disenfranchised and dismayed by the system that they don’t want to validate the process by voting. I personally feel each reason to be insufficient (though I can sympathize with the last one, especially since there is no constructive way to express discontent with the system since spoiling a federal ballot is illegal in Canada, for some reason), but each individual has the freedom to decide if she or he wants to participate. Voting is a right, not an obligation, just as, say, the freedom of peaceful assembly is a right, not an obligation. Just because that right exists doesn’t mean we are compelled to make use of it.

The shamers will also soon come to realize that one of the worst ways to get people on your side, especially in politics, is with guilt and pressure. (Ask your friends about their blocked Twitter lists if you need any further confirmation.) Perhaps it is true that young people who choose to stay home will be “ruining it for the rest of us” by lowering turnout numbers for the youth demographic, but reminding them of that will not further anyone’s cause. Nor will a vote mob dance party–sorry to interrupt the glee. The outraged can try to explain to committed non-voters why they should vote (as opposed to explaining why they are terrible people for choosing not to), or else, move to Australia and enjoy life. In Canada, the decision to vote is a personal choice and one that should be respected, even if we don’t like it.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/education/university/stop-shaming-young-people-to-vote/feed/3Putting apathy on the other foothttp://www.macleans.ca/education/university/putting-apathy-on-the-other-foot/
http://www.macleans.ca/education/university/putting-apathy-on-the-other-foot/#commentsFri, 15 Apr 2011 22:39:07 +0000http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/?p=25219Why are party leaders ignoring a group that is ripe for the political moulding?

]]>I have to admit, I’m more than a little annoyed at the lack of attention the federal leaders are giving youth voters this election.

In an age where young people are not only really easy to reach — through avenues like social media — but they are now showing they want to be reached, it’s mind-boggling how little Stephen Harper, Michael Ignatieff and Jack Layton are taking advantage of this demographic. What does a young person have to do to get Ottawa’s attention?

Everyone has been talking about how this is the election to reach youth. It all started with Rick Mercer’s early call to arms. “If you are between the age of 18 and 25 and you want to scare the hell out of the people that run this country this time around, do the unexpected [and] vote,” he challenged on March 28.

And since then, the youth of this country have answered.

Every day I come across article after article, or YouTube video after YouTube video, of youth proclaiming their engagement. They want to connect with the political parties and they want to participate in democracy is the overwhelming message from young people across this country.

And it’s not just youth making themselves heard. The media is giving attention to the youth vote, politicalgroups are giving attention to the youth vote, it virtually seems that everyone in Canada is paying attention to what young voters are doing and saying, except the people who should be paying attention the most — the leaders.

On top of their seeming apathy towards a population that holds quite a bit of sway in someridings, what’s worse is the increasing number of stories likethese, making it seem as though politicians are actively trying to turn young people off voting.

When you combine this behaviour with no mention of student issues at the English leaders’ debate, limited post-secondary education platform promises from most parties and a clear lack of engagement across the board, it’s any wonder there are any young voters left who give a damn. And I’m not convinced youth turning out in droves on May 2 is going to curb any of this current counter-apathy when we undoubtedly end up back at the polls in a year or two as seems to be the trend in this country.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/education/university/putting-apathy-on-the-other-foot/feed/0Inside the Liberal effort to resurrect Michael Ignatieffhttp://www.macleans.ca/authors/paul-wells/flatlined/
http://www.macleans.ca/authors/paul-wells/flatlined/#commentsMon, 14 Mar 2011 14:19:13 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=176560Ignatieff has done a lot of things right, but he's still dead in the polls

“I’m in Newfoundland two weeks ago,” the Liberal leader said over tea in the sunroom at Stornaway, the official Opposition leader’s residence. On the wall behind him was a landscape by the Winnipeg artist Ivan Eyre, all slate-grey skies and autumn foliage. “And I’m in a training centre run by the operating engineers’ union. Great union. And this training site is training people in heavy machinery. Everything from bulldozers to cranes.

“A third of the kids in the course are women. Half of the women are on social assistance. They’re desperate to get a union ticket to be bulldozer drivers or crane operators. They’re fabulously determined. It’s a tough course. They put me into these damned cranes and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, and they look fabulous. One of the women said to me, ‘You know, this is my ticket out of here. This is the ticket that allows me out of social assistance. This is my ticket that allows me to feed my kids. But I can’t do this if I don’t get child care.’

“When you hear a woman tell you that, you understand a lot about the economy. Unless we make these kinds of investments—in child care, in post-secondary education, in home care—we’re not going to meet the economic challenges we’ve got.”

Many hundreds of times since Ignatieff acceded to the Liberal leadership amid the wreckage of Stéphane Dion’s doomed late-2008 attempt to form a coalition government, he has read that he is a poncy silver-spoon egghead who can’t begin to imagine the struggles of ordinary Canadians. He handles this challenge by assuring a visitor repeatedly that he is not a poncy egghead. Addressing the plight of that young woman in Newfoundland “isn’t social policy,” he says. “This is rededicating ourselves to the equality of opportunity that made our country strong.”

As he spoke, there was at least a slim chance Ignatieff would find himself in a federal election campaign within a week. The semi-annual frenzy of election speculation—every September and March like clockwork—was rocking the nation’s capital. The papers were full of theories. Baroque manoeuvres in the Commons could bring Stephen Harper down any day. Everyone has to be ready for a campaign, just in case.

Now here’s the thing about Michael Ignatieff. He is doing almost everything better than Stéphane Dion was doing on the eve of the Liberal wipeout in the 2008 election. Ignatieff has spent nearly a year on the road, honing his retail skills, often for audiences of strangers he had to learn to persuade. He is not putting any highly divisive policy in the window comparable to Dion’s carbon-tax scheme. He can defend himself against attack, comprehensibly and often better than that, in two languages. His Office of the Leader of the Opposition is disciplined and coherent. His caucus deploys serious talent well. Ties between his parliamentary shop and the national Liberal party are smooth and respectful. Fundraising is a gong show. You can’t have everything.

But still: it is reasonable to expect Ignatieff will field the strongest Liberal campaign operation since Jean Chrétien’s last battle in 2000. And yet he is flatlining in the polls.

The website threehundredeight.com runs a monthly average of all federal political polls in Canada. In November, December and January, the Ignatieff Liberals averaged 28 per cent while the Harper Conservatives varied from 33 to 35 per cent.

So far, not too bad. A popular-vote outcome of 35 per cent to 28 would be about five points closer than the 2008 drubbing. The Liberals would perform only slightly worse than in 2006, when they lost to Harper for the first time.

Photograph by Blair Gable

But Ignatieff’s personal numbers are worse. Nanos Research publishes an occasional “leadership index” that combines respondents’ perceptions on trust, competence and vision for Canada. At the end of February, Harper’s score was as high as it’s been since Ignatieff became Liberal leader, at 98.9. Ignatieff’s was its lowest yet, at 36.9. His leadership index score has been below NDP Leader Jack Layton’s for 14 straight months.

Also in February, Harris Decima found that Ignatieff is viewed positively by 25 per cent of respondents and unfavourably by 51 per cent. That’s the lowest positive score of any national leader, and the highest unfavourable rating. The lowest positive rating Harris Decima ever measured for Stéphane Dion was 30 per cent. Ignatieff has been at or below that level for more than a year.

He’s being the best Liberal leader he can be. The reviews are really bad. What does he have to say about that?

Well, really, what can he say? He paused for a long time when I put the question to him, then answered slowly and very quietly. “I think about that question a different way than you do. It’s going to sound odd, but I just think we’re doing the right thing. I don’t even know why, all the time. I just know it’s the right thing when I’m out on the road. I see the connection we establish with Canadians. I see the way they’re listening. I feel that we’ve pulled an approach to politics off the road, from the bottom up, endless open mikes, endless listening. Instead of just denouncing the way Harper does politics, we’ve actually tried to do a different kind of politics.

“I’m on the road all the time. But look: I’ve shaken 50,000 hands, had 15,000 long conversations with Canadians. Of course it’s not going to show in the polls. The numbers aren’t large enough. I just think we’re getting in the right place.”

Privately, senior Liberals make much the same case. They have decided they can’t catch a fair break until an election begins. Most Canadians ignore politics if they can. News organizations pay much more attention to any government than to any opposition politician. That won’t change until a campaign begins. So Liberals are less and less interested in delaying an election.

It’s a paradoxical game plan at best. Maybe catastrophic. Their guy’s desperately unpopular? Then get him in front of voters as soon as possible. Still, it’s what you hear from more and more Liberals.

“Harper’s game plan is going to be all about: ‘The risk is too great to change governments now,’ ” a senior Ignatieff adviser said. “Maligning Ignatieff is part of that. That’s an appealing position for Harper. It makes sense. It’s a variation on what any incumbent would do.

“But at the same time there’s a kind of micro-story that, yeah, that might be true, but people individually feel they’re struggling. They’re having a really hard time making ends meet. Nobody really cares about them. And they’re anxious about the future. And they don’t feel Harper has the answers.
“And I think the opportunity is there for somebody like our guy—who’s seen as a bit of an egghead—and a party with our values to break through in an election.

“So why haven’t we been able to move? The moment might not be ripe enough. A year from now might be better, conceivably.”

So the Liberals might prefer to wait a year for an election? Here they are quick to point out that it’s not their call. “I’ve got 76 seats,” Ignatieff says. Not enough to bring a government down. He learned that lesson, to his considerable cost, in the fall of 2009 when he tried to force an election and the NDP propped the government up. “Jack Layton’s got a say. Gilles Duceppe’s got a say. But the crucial person who’ll decide whether we have an election or not is Stephen Harper.”

What’s really happening is that the Liberals are finally beginning to realize there is a cost to every choice, including paralysis. “The window might not be wide open now, but I mean, f…, it might be closed in six months,” the senior Ignatieff adviser said.

“Especially when the cost is further self-abnegation or self-mutilation from having to pull our punches. Or vote with the government. Or whatever. It’s a vicious circle, because when you do that you inhibit your ability to differentiate yourself from the government. It actually makes a lot more sense to just say, ‘F… it. They’re wrong. This guy’s numbers don’t add up. They’re actually more about F-35s and building $9-billion prisons. This government doesn’t give a s..t about you. Let’s go.’

“If we don’t go, we’re no worse off. In fact, we’re probably better off for having defined ourselves and laid down the markers. And if we do go? It’s a minority government. Things happen. These things aren’t meant to last forever.”

It’s not precisely the most stirring victory cry in the history of Canadian politics. The Liberals have made too careful a study of recent changes of government to kid themselves about how hard a task they face. “The last time the Liberals took down a Conservative government, Brian Mulroney was deeply unpopular,” the senior Ignatieff adviser said. “We had a deep recession and a constitutional crisis. And they’d been in office for almost a decade. The last time Conservatives beat Liberals,” in 2006, “the Liberals had been in power for, what, 13 years all told? And there was a casus belli with the sponsorship fiasco.

“What we’re trying to do here, what we’ve got to do, is try to win, absent those conditions.”

To do that, Ignatieff made a series of moves, beginning in late 2009, to whip a listless and underperforming Liberal operation into shape. He fired Ian Davey, his chief of staff, one of the Toronto Liberals who had driven to Harvard a few years earlier to persuade Ignatieff to return to Canada and enter politics. Most of Davey’s senior staff would not last much longer. In Davey’s place, Ignatieff hired Peter Donolo.

Donolo was the communications director who helped make Jean Chrétien prime minister in 1993. He brought a half-dozen Chrétien-era veterans with him into Ignatieff’s office, instituted clear mandates and lines of authority throughout the Office of the Leader of the Opposition—and watched for months while very little changed. Ignatieff was not more popular. The Conservatives ran waves of ads hammering home the notion that the Liberal who’d spent decades in England and the United States was “just visiting.”

So last autumn, to less fanfare, Donolo and Ignatieff instituted another wave of change. They appointed the Saskatchewan veteran Ralph Goodale as Ignatieff’s deputy leader, replacing him as Liberal House leader with Ottawa MP David McGuinty, the Ontario premier’s brother. Marcel Proulx from across the river in Hull-Aylmer became the Liberal whip.

Fred Chartrand/Cp; Sean Kilpatrick/Cp;

With McGuinty and Proulx running the Liberal operation in the House of Commons, and Goodale acting as a reliable fill-in leader during Ignatieff’s frequent road trips, the OLO has become even more of an executive operation. “The leader’s not a micromanager,” one Liberal staffer said. “He likes strong people doing their job around him.”

Goodale, who never seemed a great fit as House leader, plays a role roughly comparable to Joe Biden’s as vice-president in Barack Obama’s White House: he does not play on every file but he brings real clout when he does intervene. “He chairs a couple of strategy sessions a week with the leader and colleagues,” the senior adviser said. “On thorny issues, the leader will ask him to talk to people, sometimes inside caucus, sometimes outside. Before we jump into something he does a lot of reconnaissance.”

Ignatieff can trust Goodale to carry the ball in the Commons while he tours the country. In some ways, the Liberal leader has become so hands-off that long-time observers of the highly centralized Harper operation might be surprised. There’s this, for instance: neither Ignatieff nor Donolo attends the twice-daily question period strategy sessions.

McGuinty chairs both meetings, the first at 8 a.m., the second just before the daily jousting match. Jeremy Broadhurst, a young lawyer who has worked in the OLO since 2006, briefs the morning senior-staff meeting on the QP plan at 8:30. Donolo and others might suggest amendments to the day’s plan but they rarely do. Ignatieff is briefed, again by Broadhurst at 9:30. MPs’ offices prepare questions all morning long and McGuinty checks progress right after lunch. Ignatieff asks the questions that are needed from him at the top of QP at 2:15 p.m.

Throughout Harper’s tenure as opposition leader, and well after he became Prime Minister, he would meet at lunch with the entire shadow cabinet or cabinet for a group QP rehearsal. “The leader has to focus on what’s important,” the senior Ignatieff adviser said, hinting at the heretical possibility that QP prep might not be the most essential use of a party leader’s time. “I know in the past, other opposition leaders and even [Ignatieff], in other circumstances, would go in there and work up the question period lineup, rehearse his questions. But no.”

The same highly regimented approach to assignments works on the staffing side, too. It’s often said that the OLO is run, not by Peter Donolo, but by Pat Sorbara, a former adviser to one-time Ontario premier David Peterson. Sorbara’s name appears below Donolo’s on the org chart. Her title is “chief operating officer.” That’s telling. Somebody with less clout would be styled the “director of operations,” but Sorbara really is a chief. She is charged with running the details of the OLO operation while Donolo handles broad-strokes strategy. That means for most Liberal staffers, the most stressful phone call they can imagine will come from Sorbara. She doesn’t breathe fire, a Liberal party insider said, “but she doesn’t suffer fools gladly. And if she doesn’t like you, you don’t last long.”

Sorbara has also been working on voter identification and motivation, the meat and potatoes of modern campaigning. With Gordon Ashworth, the Liberals’ eternal national campaign chairman, she road-tested the database software and focused messaging for a campaign during last autumn’s by-elections in Winnipeg and Vaughan, outside Toronto. The Liberals lost Vaughan narrowly but won the Winnipeg riding from the NDP. “We’re running at the same speed as the Tories now on that stuff,” the Liberal party insider said of the party’s voter ID techniques. “That makes a big difference.”

So where’s the growth for a Liberal party that desperately needs growth? Disaffected former Liberals, mostly. People who’ve stayed home rather than vote for Paul Martin or Stéphane Dion. “The new Liberal voter that we need to win back is largely female, largely 50 and under, largely suburban, largely middle class—lower middle class too—largely indebted, largely non-Anglo-Saxon,” the senior Ignatieff adviser said. “But not exclusively, right? Just like the Conservative voter is largely male; largely over 50; largely Western Canadian; largely rural.

“The problem is we left too many of those folks at home in the last election. So that’s who our vote is. We’re already doing fine with certain segments. Not enough. We’re doing fine with youngish voters, but there are issues there with turnout. We’re doing fine with university-educated voters, but again, there’s not enough of this to go around.”

Photograph by Christopher Pike

What the Liberals really must avoid, this person said, is a fragmented vote. “In an election that’s going to be heavily polarized—that we’re going to work like mad to polarize—[the NDP] get squeezed big time. And we need to squeeze them big time because we can’t afford an NDP at 18 per cent and a Bloc at 10 per cent. Can’t afford that.

“Frankly we also can’t afford a Bloc at the level they’re at. You’re going to see a very different treatment of the Bloc than it has been in the past. It’s going to be less, ‘You’re bastards who want to destroy the country.’ It’s going to be, ‘Actually, you Quebecers haven’t got a thing in common with Harper. You abhor him more than any other Canadians do. And if you really want to get rid of him, don’t vote Bloc. Because voting for the Bloc is what keeps him in office.’ ”

That’s the rhetoric. What are they going to put in their platform? What’s there to vote for, besides a clever parsing of Conservative shortcomings?

In the sunroom at Stornoway, Ignatieff gave a pretty detailed answer to that question. The Liberals have been refining their platform for more than a year. “There are two fundamental issues for the country,” Ignatieff said. “One is, ‘Does this Prime Minister respect the democratic restrictions placed on the authority of a prime minister? Yes or no?’

“Issue number two is, ‘Can this Prime Minister be trusted, as we move forward, with the key sources of economic success?’ Which are: a health care system you can count on; a pension system you can count on; child care when you need it to get into the job market.”

On the first issue, the Liberals do not believe the nation is with them in believing Harper is a threat to democracy. The constant drip-drip of embarrassing stories has ignited no national outrage. Bev Oda altered a memo from her department to make support for a project look like opposition. A fundraising letter went out from Jason Kenney’s office on ministerial letterhead, not Conservative party stationery.

“It’s not the burning issue in the mind of the average voter,” a Liberal who has worked on the platform said. “But it’s significant because it’s significant. This is a government and a Prime Minister that have demonstrated again and again and again and again that they think the rules don’t apply to them. Sometimes they think the laws don’t apply to them. There really is a real issue about our democracy being eroded. It’s quite real.”

There are, in fact, some in the Liberal caucus who think the only way to spark a public debate about such relatively arcane issues is to put them at the centre of an election campaign. Which is why some MPs quietly support provoking an election before the March 22 budget, if it can be done.

As for the economic stuff, it gives the Liberals a shot—a long shot, to be sure—at displacing the Conservatives as a party that working-class Canadians feel is on their side.

“I actually think that the reason our country has been economically successful since the Second World War—in Liberal governments, in Conservative governments, in and out—has been that we’ve cared about equality of opportunity,” Ignatieff said.

Equality of opportunity will be a running theme of the Liberal campaign, then. It is a darned sight less flashy than Dion’s plan to shift billions of dollars from income taxes to carbon taxes, but it may sound less like it was delivered to the electorate by space aliens.

The Liberals will target rising university tuition. How? “Watch this space,” Ignatieff said. “We’ve got a very specific, costed, serious investment to make in removing barriers to access in post-secondary education. I’m thinking particularly of those Canadian families whose moms and dads didn’t get a chance at a university or college education and they want their kids to go. And we’re going to do something additional for Aboriginal Canadians.”

They’ve already announced a compassionate-leave plan to allow Canadians to take time off work, paid out of the Employment Insurance fund, to care for elderly relatives in declining health. They’ll also work to supplement the Canada Pension Plan through voluntary supplementary payments into the public pension system. They will, having twice lost the debate to the Conservatives about public child care versus direct cash payments to parents, try again with a more modest daycare project.

“One Canadian child in five under the age of five has access to a certified child care space. That’s not good enough,” Ignatieff said. “Nobody’s going to ram child care down families’ throats if they don’t want it. That stuff about ‘choice’ “—the preferred Conservative mantra for their per-child cheques—”is nonsense. You don’t have a choice if you don’t have child care spaces. And we haven’t built enough child care spaces in Canada.”

“There’s a universe of contrast opportunity on this ground,” said the Liberal who has been working on the party’s platform, “if we can actually get heard.”

This is the gamble the Liberals are rallying around, with varying degrees of enthusiasm: that they will be heard if they can start a real fight. Party pollster Michael Marzolini tells them approval for Ignatieff is higher among the narrow slice of the electorate that pays attention to politics between elections. Very well then: widen the slice. Don’t fear the electorate. Run toward it, arms waving.

“When the lights go on in an election, Canadians will have an alternative,” Ignatieff said. “That’s my job. My job is to give them an alternative. And then they’re the boss. They’ll decide what they’re going to do.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/i-want-there-to-be-a-federal-election-in-2011-because/feed/40So you want to be a member of Parliament?http://www.macleans.ca/authors/scott-feschuk/any-idiot-could-do-it-but-could-you/
http://www.macleans.ca/authors/scott-feschuk/any-idiot-could-do-it-but-could-you/#commentsThu, 26 Aug 2010 12:34:01 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=143160It takes a dazzling set of skills to be an MP. Like having a hand, to pound things with.

With a federal election likely to come as early as this fall, a number of Canadians are toying with the idea of running for office. Do you have what it takes to be a member of Parliament? Let’s find out.

Do you like birthdays? Do you like other people’s birthdays? Do you like being obligated to show up at other people’s birthdays, anniversaries, retirement parties, book launches, interventions, seances, hoedowns and circumcisions? As an MP, you’ll get invited to everything and be expected to give a speech paying tribute to the individual/group/penis.

Do you have at least one hand? Pounding your hand on things is important in politics—desks, tables, the heads of small children, whatever’s around. Your leader: “Our political rivals despise our freedom, our way of life and this cute panda I’m holding.” You: [Pounding vigorously?.?.?.?]

Is your primary skill the ability to occupy physical space? If so, you may already be a member of the Conservative caucus. Please double check before filing new nomination papers.

Do you lack the capacity to feel? It sounds harsh but it helps to have a paucity of human emotion. As an MP, you will be subjected to enough confrontation, humiliation and profanity to make that Jet Blue flight attendant go, “Here, dude, you need these beers more than me.” A normal person would respond by weeping for hours in the fetal position. An MP responds by smiling serenely and carrying on. And by developing horribly painful stress ulcers.

How do you feel about spending your entire summer eating hamburgers and hot dogs at dozens of community cookouts? True story: by the time he retired after 40 years in politics, Herb Gray was hickory smoked.

Are you committed to the idea of public service? Representing your constituents and voting your conscience is the sacred duty of all MPs. Unless you’re told not to do that, which is what usually happens.

Are you excited about moving to the nation’s capital? Life in Ottawa is great if you like extremes in weather and a downtown uncluttered by visual appeal, entertainment attractions and, after 6:30 p.m., humans.

Does your spouse hate you? It helps if your spouse hates you. It will save you both the pain of your spouse growing to hate you. Understand something: being a political wife or husband is about the worst thing imaginable—unless you have a good imagination, and can imagine Bob Rae in a tankini. The spouse is forced to listen to the same speech over and over and pretend to be riveted. The spouse must attend tedious functions and pretend to be interested. The spouse must experience tender family moments and pretend you’re not sitting there thinking to yourself, “This will make a great anecdote that will further humanize me in the eyes of the electorate!”

Are you a quick learner? There are advantages to being an MP. International junkets. Free domestic travel. Getting close enough to Peter MacKay to actually hear him flex his pectorals as a pretty lady walks by. That’s all good stuff. But you need to swiftly learn the nuances of political life, such as grasping parliamentary procedure and discovering that Ken Dryden can speak for 45 minutes on any topic, including, “How are you, Ken?”

Do you have the energy for it? Don’t get me wrong: there are more exhausting jobs out there. Mining for coal. Working construction. Being Tom Cruise’s smile. But an MP’s day begins early and ends late. Think of it this way: do you ever come home after a gruelling workday and think to yourself, “Man, I sure wish there was a meeting of the Rotary Club tonight?”

Are you prepared to embarrass yourself, your country and your system of government with your behaviour in question period? Some people can bray like a donkey. Others can make obscene gestures. But Parliament Hill is the big time—you should be able to do both simultaneously.

Results: If you answered yes to most of these questions, you just may be ready to run for federal office. If you answered yes to the last question, Stephen Harper will be dropping by shortly to sign your nomination papers.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/authors/scott-feschuk/any-idiot-could-do-it-but-could-you/feed/21Here comes a softer, Steve-ier Stevehttp://www.macleans.ca/authors/scott-feschuk/here-comes-a-softer-steve-ier-steve/
http://www.macleans.ca/authors/scott-feschuk/here-comes-a-softer-steve-ier-steve/#commentsWed, 09 Sep 2009 21:20:23 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=79204Yes, an election is in the air, for our PM, aided by a series of levers and pulleys, is smiling

]]>There’s no longer any doubt: a federal election is on its way. We know this because Stephen Harper has started Giving Something of Himself.

Last time around, we could tell an election was coming when Harper donned a sweater vest and appeared in TV commercials in which he spoke in gentle tones and—aided by a series of levers and pulleys operated by a team of stout men and a pack horse—smiled.

This time he’s taken it up a notch, giving a magazine interview in which he “opens up” about his hopes, his children and the fact that, “When I play the piano, I become very involved emotionally. I’m no longer the same person.” (Spoiler alert: the person he becomes is named Denise and Denise doesn’t take requests, okay?) Another few weeks of laying the groundwork for a campaign and the Prime Minister will be “reluctantly” sharing some of his poetry from a Hello Kitty diary while braiding Lloyd Robertson’s hair.

The interview with Harper, published in Quebec’s Prestige magazine, is quite revealing. “My main preoccupation is not my personal image,” confesses the man who hired a stylist to comb his hair and pick out his ties, “but rather the country’s higher interests.” I think we all know what this means: Harper is getting his stylist to make over the entire country! You know, play down those unsightly bulges out west, spruce up those Prairies and—ugh!—that Canadian Shield has just got to go. It is so 540 million BCE.

The magazine piece features photographs of Harper skating with his son, playing cards with his daughter and building a temple from the bleached skulls of his enemies. (One of these examples may be made up.) But even as the PM rolls out his softer, Steve-ier side in the press, he remains focused on bringing serious, hard-nosed change to the way Ottawa works.

For instance, Liberal prime ministers used to dole out cushy jobs to their party loyalists, but Steve changed all that. Now he doles out cushy jobs to his party loyalists. Status quo, consider your mind blown.

Harper has named donors and party workers to government boards and authorities. He’s named them to government tribunals and commissions. Recently, he named so many close friends and associates to the Senate that we should all be relieved he didn’t accidentally appoint one of his cats. Although that would have given Conservative campaign mastermind Doug Finley—one of the new Senate appointees—something to stroke menacingly while preparing to kill James Bond. Now he’ll have to make do with Mike Duffy.

To be fair, it’s not as though Harper is appointing only party hacks. He’s also appointing a few non-hacks whose job it is to draw attention away from the hacks. Incoming senator Jacques Demers, former coach of the Montreal Canadiens, was so humbled by the honour of serving his country that he immediately asked if he could keep his day job as a hockey analyst. Life as a Canadian senator: drop by if you can squeeze it in.

Harper’s slew of patronage appointments riled those who, adorably, fail to understand that political pledges, especially those regarding integrity and accountability, are the Velveeta of promises—they vaguely resemble the real thing but then on closer inspection, umm, no.

National Post editors were so distressed by the shots being taken at their boy Steve that they rushed to his defence with an editorial, which had all the intellectual heft of the “Leave Britney alone!” video and twice the girlish whimpering. The Post posited that poor, helpless Harper was simply left with no choice—he had to stuff the Senate with senior Conservative party figures. Don’t you understand: he had to! LEAVE STEPHEN ALONE!!

Anyway, Harper’s principles may have gone bye-bye but his reading of the political climate is as savvy as ever. The Liberals do indeed seem poised to force an election this fall. According to reports, the party will soon roll out a “massive” ad campaign designed to let Canadians “get to know” Michael Ignatieff—to help them put their feet in his shoes, their necks in his ascot.

Apparently, Ignatieff has “an inspirational dream” to turn Canadians into the best-educated people on earth by 2017, the 150th anniversary of Confederation. How he plans to deport Don Cherry by then is unclear.

Which brings us back to that interview with the Prime Minister. What earned the attention of headline writers wasn’t Harper’s piano-playing alter ego but rather his assertion that he is more concerned about God’s judgment of his time on earth than historians’ judgment of his time in office.

Frankly, this seems a sensible viewpoint for a man of faith. But that doesn’t mean Stephen Harper is willing to leave that judgment entirely to fate.

Hey God, any interest in sitting in the Senate? You can keep your day job.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/authors/scott-feschuk/here-comes-a-softer-steve-ier-steve/feed/76A liveblog review of My Story, by Julie Couillardhttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/a-liveblog-review-of-my-story-by-julie-couillard/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/a-liveblog-review-of-my-story-by-julie-couillard/#commentsThu, 02 Oct 2008 16:29:37 +0000http://macleans.wordpress.com/?p=10500Couillard’s 317-page account of her life and ill-fated affair with Maxime Bernier, landed today on newsroom desks across the country (M&S, $29.99). The advance billing—primed by its author in select …

]]>Couillard’s 317-page account of her life and ill-fated affair with Maxime Bernier, landed today on newsroom desks across the country (M&S, $29.99). The advance billing—primed by its author in select media interviews—suggests the book could cause a stir on the campaign trail.

Maclean’s national affairs correspondent Charlie Gillis is reading it, and will share observations as he goes.

(For Day 2, please scroll down)

Day 1

Noon — First impressions: it looks and feels as rushed as it is. After initially setting a release date of Oct. 14, the day of the election, Couillard and her publishers bumped up first to Oct. 6, then to tomorrow. The page stock feels cheap (think foolscap from grade school), but there are 16-pages of b&w photos in the middle. Predictably, Julie looks great in a lot of them.

She sets quite a tone in the dedication:

“… to women who, like me, have had their reputations and lives destroyed by the wagging tongues of men in power.”

Strap on your seatbelt, Max. I have a feeling this is going to get rough.

(Note to readers: patience appreciated; I can only type so fast. As ever, responses, rejoinders and criticism welcome).

12:20 p.m. — Intro. Don’t usually read ’em, but this one’s off to a good start, with a rail at a “scandal-obsessed media” that “delighted in perpetrating the worst drivel and falsehoods imaginable…” Hey, wait a minute, that’s me you’re talking about.

It’s essentially a rant about how miserable the media made her and her family during l’affaire Couillard-Bernier. I don’t doubt that. But I don’t think she was made out to be the “monster” she claims.

12:30 p.m. — Chapter 1, “Mixed Roots.” Her first memory is the day her dog died. Yikes, I hope this gets cheerier…

Actually, the dog thing is part of a broader self-portrait a sort of Snow White figure. Loves animals, very gentle, full of love, small woodland creatures gather around her feet etc. Did her editor (ghostwriter?) explain the concept of hyperbole to her?

Early childhood in Ville-Émard, blue-collar hood on the southwest Island, French-Scot-Irish background; parents married at 18 because they were pregnant with her sister.

First brush with fame: won “cutest baby contest” held by a local TV station. Moved to the ‘burbs north of Montreal when she was four.

12:45 p.m. — Chapter 2, “Life in Lorraine.” Her mother’s warning not to marry “the first man you meet” comes home. Iydillic childhood is disrupted when her mother Diane finds a lipstick-stained cigarette butt in the car (neither parents smoked).

So her father, Marcel, was cheating. He was a “profoundly dysfunctional” man who made promises he didn’t keep. Her parents began squabbling, and she developed a defence mechanism, falling asleep as soon as they started. The marriage wasn’t violent, only loveless. You can see where this is heading:

” … since I had known nothing else, it was hard for me to put a name to the vague unease that I felt—a sort of nostalgic longing for something that had never existed in world, that is, a close-knit family that would gather together at mealtimes, playfully tease one another, talk about the little things …”

I should note that the editors have added little pull-quotes to stand as subtitles for every chapter. This one is “Little girls need to love their fathers,” which typifies the banality of a lot of her observations. Still, the tone of the early-years stuff is pretty heartfelt, at least to my ear.

By now, the family numbers five: mum, dad, Julie, her sister Johanne and her little brother Patrick. Her father, who had been a lithographer with the Montreal Gazette newspaper, decides he’s going to be a building contractor, a decision that casts the family into financial instability. He’s too disorganized and undisciplined, says Julie.

Another brief period of idyll after they move into a house her father has built in Lorraine. But her dad is driven into bankruptcy penury after a bad transaction with an electrician. Diane is forced to work nights as waitress. At 10, she says, she “gained a vague understanding of the value of money—or at least the hardships that can result from lack of it.”

In short, she has dad issues and money issues, which I feel like I might have predicted.

1:18 p.m. — Chapter 4, “Waltz of the Bailiffs.”

The bleakness is getting Dickensian. And just to be clear, her father didn’t declare bankruptcy after the thing with the electrician. He did something worse, in Julie’s mind, which was try to crawl out of the debt hole. Upshot: the bailiffs threaten to take away their furniture. Mum has a job with the Catholic school board, by now, so they don’t.

“Soon after that, my sister and I started telling our mother we’d be better off without him, that we can manage on our own, that she should leave him.”

1:50 p.m. — Chapters 5,6, 7 “Floodwaters Rising.” We through the formative childhood stuff, and practitioners of basic arithmetic will tell me we need to pick things up a bit. So I’ll sum this up as a personal section, with the following disclosures

• she had, still has, epilepsy, which went undiagnosed until she was 12; she lived in fear of being institutionalized; she was reassured that luminaries like Nostradamus, Napolean and Einstien had it (?!). But it has made her tough

• kissed—or rather was kissed by—her first boy at 12; started going in cars with boys at 14 but didn’t have sex with her 16-year-old b.f. Michel (she’s protecting the names of the innocent here, though I’m not sure why; it all seems legal). Got asked to model fur at a trade show when she was working for the Leather Ranch on Ste. Catherine Street.

• she got a secretarial job at a law office; she and Michel bought property, two duplexes in when she was just 17, and moved in. But the properties flooded in 1987. Now I know why she used a pseudonym for Michel; she got in spat with him over who was paying what. They sold properties in a troubled transaction and broke even.

2 p.m. — Chapter 8 “Breakup.” Things end badly with Michel. He parties, he closes the bar, he does drugs. They’d gotten $40,000 from the city for flood repairs on the duplexes.

“That first relationship had given me a taste of all the disillusionment that I’d seen my mother experience with my father. There was precious little I could take from my time with Michel that could change my low opinion of men.”

2:30 p.m. — Chapters 9, 10, 11 & 12 “Hotel California.” This is Couillard’s “men-of-my-young-womanhood” montage. She takes a job waitressing at a strip bar in the late ’80s but leaves because she doesn’t like the atmosphere. Still, she meets Norman there, a bouncer-cum-bodybuilder who does steroids. They move in together, but one day Norman, in the throes of a ‘roid rage grabs her by throat. So she leaves. “I’m not one to play the battered woman.”

Then there’s Tony, a guy she meets at a bar when she’s in a party phase of her own—”soaking up the downtown Montreal bar scene,” as she puts it. Turns out Tony is Tony Volpato, “who many people claimed was a key figure in the Montreal mafia” (maybe because he palled around with Frank Cotroni??). “Contrary to what some newspapers have claimed, I was never romantically involved with Tony Volpato,” she assures us, “and he never made any advances”.

But Tony was a gentleman, and Tony did her a “huge favour.” At this point, Norman was apparently stalking her, which gave her the blues. “Let me take care of it,” Tony said quietly.

Apparently Tony’s intervention was non-violent, but highly effective.

Finally, there is Steve, another guy she meets in a bar downtown. Steve (not his real name) plays for the Montreal Machine of the short-lived World League of American Football. He invites her to come stay in California. I must say, Couillard’s babe-in-the-woods act is wearing thin. Consider this passage:

“[Steve] turned out to be nothing like the gentleman I had met just a few weeks earlier in Montreal. He immediately assumed that I was going to hop in the sack with him, based on the mere fact that we were going to spend a week under the same roof. I realized there was a world of difference between the mindsets of Americans and Canadians, especially in men’s attitudes toward women.”

As a Canadian male, I must say I’m flattered.

Meantime, I’m not entirely clear why she left that secretarial job way back in Chapter 7 … but whatever.

2:45 p.m. — Chapters 13, “Gilles.” I think we all know this will be important. Gilles Giguère is the biker associate to whom no man can ever compare. Not even (or perhaps least of all) a federal cabinet minister. But Gilles is also the man for whom she now wears the heinous and degrading label of “biker chick.”

Couillard met Gilles in Montreal just before her ill-fated trip to Cali to stay with Steve what she assumed would be platonic bliss. They saw each other across a crowded Lafleur restaurant, where she’d gone for a hot-dog.

“All I could focus on was those eyes, brimming with gentleness and goodness and wielding a strange power over me.”

They were friends for a year before they were lovers, and trust me, I’m sparing you some tracts of particularly treacly prose in condensing it thus. Oh, okay, you asked for it:

“Very soon I came to consider Gilles my best friend, the kind of friend I could go to a restaurant with and enjoy a long dinner, talk about any subject under the sun, turn the world upside down and change it, and then change it all over again.

“He was my confidant, a kind of big brother who was privy to everything that happened to me; I would tell him about the people I hung around, even the men I slept with. And he told me everything as well: secrets, minor worries and major anxieties, his plans, his love affairs.”

Nothing in here about Gilles being a biker, but they do go out dancing one night and, finally, end up in torrid kiss on her doorstep. “It was like falling into an airbag or a downy pillow … It felt like a scene in a movie, with two lovers sharing a languorous kiss and the woman voluptuously lifting one foot off the ground in a sign of pleasure and abandon.”

Good lord.

3:20 p.m — Chapters 14, 15, “The Gangster.” Before we get to this, I should say the book is an easy read. Sure, Couillard’s recollected dialogue sounds like English dubbing from Lance et compte (“Okay, that’s it, mister … you’ve got the gall to treat me like dirt?! Well I’m not going to take it any more!”). But the narrative flows nicely. She thanks someone in the epilogue named Serge Rivest for “listening, summarizing and writing.” So props to Serge and the M&S editors.

Ah Gilles! What can we say about this man that will do him justice? How about: “He was a friend, a brother, a lover and a husband to me.”? Yup, that covers it. Gilles, an apparently penniless construction worker, supported Couillard’s renewed desire to model and act. She got walk-on roles in a whole raft of film and TV productions, including Highlander III, and the TVA miniseries on the life of René Lévesque, in which she appeared topless as one of the great man’s mistresses. Not to sound misogynist, but I don’t recall that image in any of the post-Bernier post-mortems.

Roch Voisine hit on her, and she turned him down because of Gilles.

So imagine poor Julie’s surprise when he lets on that he did time for robbery when he was 19. She’s glossing, here, to put it mildly. He never sold drugs never “had firearm, but “after a while” she figured out “Gilles was a moneylender.”

A moneylender? Er no. Fannie and Freddie are moneylenders. Gilles was a loanshark.

3:45 p.m. — This is where we run up against the hard contradictions in Couillard’s self-image, touched upon in today’s Globe by my friend and former colleague, Christie Blatchford. She wants us to believe she’s a dreamy-eyed innocent one minute; a savvy, sultry woman of the world the next. I’m not saying the two are mutually exclusive. But you have to own up to the friends you choose.

(P.S. thanks to all those commenters who feel sorry me; honestly, the book really isn’t that bad. And it appears that her mother has dumped her father, who has been left penniless in a crummy walk-up. Gilles, bless his soul, is providing him with occasional work on construction sites).

“Gilles was no angel,” but “Gilles was a man of principle.” Those statements are on facing pages, 86 and 87. Evidently, Gilles was such a man of principle that none of his debtors got too far behind in repaying their, ah, principals. Julie went to dinner at a restaurant with him one night; afterward the resto owner slipped Gilles an envelope. “Obviously, if I had been forced to watch him beat somebody up who had missed a payment, or heard of him doing such a thing, I would have been very upset,” she says. “But that wasn’t Gilles’ style.”

She’s lashing out, though, at press depictions of Gilles as a gang kingpin. “We never lacked for anything, but we never lived in luxury either … the entire time we were together, we never took any fancy trips etc, etc..”

Oh, but she did wind up meeting this guy Gilles had known for years. Gilles had helped the guy out when he got out of prison and needed a job. Gilles had become the go-to man for any construction work the guy needed.

The guy’s name was Mom Boucher.

4:07 p.m. — On meeting Mom:

“Gilles had given me the lowdown on who “Mom” Boucher was. When we were introduced, he grabbed my hand hard and began shaking it violently, which made my breasts start shaking as well. I thought it was uncalled-for behaviour, to say the least. But what struck me even more was the incredible void that I saw in his eyes—an utter lack of conscience. I was instantly afraid of him; his presence literally sent shivers down my spine. I remember that after we got home, I said to Gilles in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t prepared to spend many evenings out with these sorts of people—if at all.”

“Many evenings”? Way to draw that line, Julie.

But she says she found the bikers and their girlfriends “vulgar,” and claims she and Gilles spent little time with them.

4:30 p.m. —Chapter 16, “Carnival of the Animals.” The Animals are the cops. And the tone is, er, shifting. Couillard’s starting to sound less Mary Poppins and more like Adrianna from the Sopranos. Léo Lemieux, the guy who rats out dear Gilles is “a real motormouth.” He was “like some kind of Columbo, permanently in detective mode.”

“He’s got to be a police informant,” she tells Gilles and his buddy Robert Savard. “He’s going to be bad news for you someday.”

The cops’ raid on the couples’ condo in December 1995 is violent. They burst in at 6 a.m. beat the crap out of Gilles, leer at Julie, who had been in bed naked. Yeah, SWAT teams are no fun.

A lot of stuff follows suggesting she and Gilles were denied due process, but really sounds more like the techniques of hard interrogation. She asked for her lawyer, only to be told he had been arrested the same day in the same sweep (true). She never did manage to see a lawyer before they released her 18 hours later. “Sacred principles like citizens’ rights are all very well in theory. But when the police are holding someone captive in a tiny room at headquarters, on their turf, and nobody knows about it, rights don’t mean a thing,” she says.

I’m no cop wanker, but I met some of the guys on the police unit she’s talking about (the Wolverine task force). Their lives, never mind their rights, were at risk because of their work. So, you know: boo hoo.

4:51 p.m. — More insinuation of illegal behaviour by the cops. She files an ethics complaint about the officers’ behaviour, but abandons it after receiving a threatening phone call.

Meantime, the raid is weighing heavily on the sainted Gilles, who admits to her he’s signed some sworn statements under police duress. He says they used threats involving Couillard, but she doesn’t say what the threats were. Gilles grew sullen, withdrawn, angry, inconsolable.

4:58 p.m. — Chapter 17, “Death Close Up.” The cops have charged Gilles with conspiracy to commit murder, then abruptly drop the counts two months later. Again contradiction time: she and Gilles have decided to get married! They put the wedding off though, because Gilles still faces some drug and weapons possession charges (not his drugs or weapons, says Juile, but the informant’s).

April 26, 1996, she has a premonition of Gilles’ death. He heads out to a depanneur, and she “for some reason decided it was incredibly important to give him a kiss.” But she rushes downstairs to see his truck pulling away.

Two agonizing days of searching, and then the cops find his body, with six bullet wounds. She’s numb, in denial, doesn’t believe the cops. Then she turns on the TV to see his body in a ditch. There’s an account of agonizing moments she spends with her brother Patrick, then with other family members. I should mention here that Gilles has a young son, of whom he shares custody. It all would probably come across as melodramatic in an excerpt, but it reads as heartfelt.

“I thought to myself that if the Hells Angels orchestrated the murder, if they had made the mistake of believing that Gilles was an informant, they might very well have been suspicious about me.”

As to the question of whether Gilles was a rat, it strikes me as a red herring. Even though the previous charges had been dropped, his statements to police would have been enough for the club to make a move, no? And given all the foregoing, I’m at a loss to understand why she thinks she so hard done by the press. She was clearly moving in criminal circles, perilously close to the top.

Anyway, she was paranoid after Gilles’ death, and for good reason. Still, she gets herself licensed as a contractor and tries to set herself up as a project manager, working with subcontractors. It goes predictably badly—unforeseen mishaps etc.

All this, I guess, by way of explaining her weird business history of setting up companies that never seem to do any work.

6 p.m. — Chapters 20 & 21, “Stéphane.” Just in case you’re wondering, Bernier doesn’t show up until Chapter 34. I guess there’s a lot of prologue we need to know here. Or maybe Maxime really was an afterthought for this woman. He comprises less than a quarter of the book!

Also, Couillard is doing a pretty good job rubbishing some of the press description of her as a gold digger, if not those that call her a biker chick. Recall that that she turned down Roch Voisine, who was a pretty big wheel in the early ’90s, for Gilles, who didn’t have a pot to piss in (or so she says). Most of these guys she dates do seem like schnooks, frankly.

And now were on to Stéphane.

As you may recall, he’s biker No. 2 (okay, biker “associate” No. 2; DON’T call Gilles a biker). She meets him (where else?) at a bar in ’97, and quickly sees he’s an associate of the Rockers, a Hells Angels affiliate club during the height of the Quebec biker wars.

And yet:

“In those days, I was going through survivor’s guilt. I was finding it very difficult to accept the fact that I hadn’t seen Gilles’s murder coming. At that point, I thought to myself, If I hadn’t been able to save Gilles, maybe I could at least save this guy Stéphane.”

It’s hard to know where to begin with that little apercu, or where to end. Suffice to say, after meeting Mom Boucher, the walking Dementor, at Gilles’s funeral, wouldn’t you run screaming from any of these guys?

Stéphane was a slickster, a smooth talker, though. He said he’d had enough of this biker life. The war between the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine was out of control. He was turning in his patches. Next thing you know, they’re dating, trying to buy land together. Three months later over, hot dogs (again!), he asks her to marry him.

6:35 p.m. — Long story short: the relationship is a living hell. Stéphane has no money and borrows heavily from Julie. When they marry, she has to pay $12,000 for the rings. It’s the beginning of a terrible comedy. She imagines she sees Gilles at the altar on the way down the aisle; the hotel stops their credit cards at the honeymoon resort in the Bahamas. She comes home to find out Stéphane up to his ears to everyone—his mortgage holders, the phone company, the utilities.

Stéphane sinks into a depression and begins manipulating Julie, telling her if she doesn’t pay off his debts, his biker friends are going to kill him.

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Day 2

When we left off, Couillard had decided she’d had enough with Stéphane Sirois, the biker she married against her better judgment. A couple of reflections:

1.) Couillard’s stated purpose in publishing this book was to counter media depictions of her as a trashy biker ho and a gold-digger. We haven’t seen much gold-digging, for sure. But the Stéphane section does nothing to mitigate—indeed fuels—the perception that she was part of the biker world, rubbing shoulders with Mom Boucher, et al. In previous chapters, she’s maintained she disliked and feared the bikers. So why on earth did she hook up with Sirois. Why?? Moreover, some biker-savvy wisdom has seeped onto the page in the Sirois chapter. You get the sense she understood these people quite well, and it is clear they were aware of what she was doing with her life. Why is this important? Because we know she later was applying for federal airport security contracts, and bikers have an abiding interest in airports. I don’t think she’s telling us everything, frankly.

2.) I think it’s safe to assume that hurting Bernier is the true motivation for publishing the book, especially during the election campaign. But if Bernier is a vain airhead, as Couillard has maintained in recent interviews, if their relationship was short and loveless, why is she so determined to do him damage? After all, he’s not the one who smeared her.

Not sure I can answer that yet. But I’m developing a theory based on the previous chapters. To me, Couillard’s life has been defined by two things: an all-consuming ambition to leave her hard-scrabble roots behind, and useless men who dragged that dream down. She is now 30 in this narrative. She is known to police and she has yet to find anything resembling a successful partner who lives in the straight world (by which I mean non-criminal). If she finally identifies this as the problem in her life, then you could see the attraction of someone like Bernier, given the government contacts he could provide for her nascent real estate business. You could also see being very upset, when her relationship with Bernier busts all that up.

Suffice to say, she has a legitimate beef with Sirois, who told the press she was “attracted to people with money and power.” “He somehow failed to realize that he was a glaring example of just the opposite.”

I like that line.

10:50 a.m. — Chapters 22 &23, “A Painful Decision.”

Ugh.

To expedite her divorce from Stéphane, she decided she needed to commit adultery. So we now have Bruno, a real estate contact, in the picture. Oh, and Stéphane has turned Crown’s evidence against the bikers. He’s in witness protection. She gets pregnant by Bruno, and gets an abortion.

You know, Couillard tells us a lot we don’t need to know, and leaves out a lot we do.

She has moved in with Bruno (!), of whom we never learn much (what does he do?), and back out. She’s waitressing, and working as an “assistant sommelier” at a restaurant (is that like a bartender?).

11:39 a.m. — Chapters 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 “Robert.”

Just so you know, before Robert comes “Sylvain,” who is also a chapter title. The men are signposts in her life. Sylvain, who owns a car dealership, looks fairly promising, except he’s married. Their connection appears to be real estate. I have to say, I’m getting a bit irritated by Couillard’s efforts to portray herself as some sort of Donald Trump. Her real estate gambits to date, starting with the duplexes she bought with Michel (remember him?), were all duds and squibs. Which is why she’d bartending.

Apparently Sylvain has game in the real estate biz, though. Yet as ever, sex unravels the whole thing. First they were a dynamic duo, scooping up repossessed properties, with Sylvain paying Julie modest commissions. Now they’re in bed together. Good grief.

Couillard loses her patience with Sylvain because he won’t leave his wife. He keeps spending weekends and holidays with the old ball and chain. My favourite quote: “In a love triangle, cuckolded woman isn’t always the married one.” Wow.

11:53 a.m. — More financial problems, blamed on her dad who was supposed to be paying property taxes on a house she and her brother owned, but didn’t. She and her brother have dad forcibly evicted. He’s out of her life to this day. Then an “administrative error” leaves her on the hook for unpaid taxes. She declares personal bankruptcy at the end of 2002.

Pattern: financial mishap after financial mishap, always the fault of some man.

She winds up crawling back to Sylvain (my words, not hers). She has previously described him as cheap, but suddenly he’s a wannabe James Bond who buys all manner of toys, including a Lamborghini Diablo ($380,000).

He puts her up at a swank South Beach hotel, where she claims the actor Gabriel Byrne makes a pass at her. No thanks, she says. I’m sticking with the married guy from Laval.

12:20 p.m. — We’re done with Sylvain, I think. He still won’t leave his wife and the affair sours after Stéphane has surfaced in a magazine saying nasty things about Couillard. He leaves her in Venice with $100. There are times when I do feel truly sorry for her.

More failed work in real estate development, this time as a sales co-oridinator for a group of construction companies. But she has met Robert Pépin, who offers her a managing partnership in a security firm (?!). Out of the blue. “It was certainly an attractive proposition … they seemed like a serious outfit…”

1:25 p.m. — Chapters 29 & 30, “Locked Out.”

Okay we’re into the airport stuff. The security company, DRP, begins offering a “fully integrated security and alarm system” no one can match. Robert has a connection with Jacques Duchesneau, president of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA). They want to put their security system in airports across the country.

Elaborate description of the security hoops they jumped through to bid. They didn’t get the contract, but did the opportunity to view the specs amount to a security risk, given Couillard’s past with the bikers?

“…that is nothing less than absurd. I’m not at all familiar with the infiltration methods employed by members of criminal organizations, but I highly doubt that such people would have needed us to carry out such an exercise.”

Then again, Julie, maybe they were waiting for you to get the contract.

Meantime, and without warning, the “inevitable has happened” (her words): she’s sleeping with Robert Pépin, even though he drinks more heavily than anyone she’s ever seen. Does anyone else feel like screaming at this point? Something like: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP SCREWING EVERY MAN WHO WORMS HIS WAY INTO YOUR LIFE!!

Some soap-opera stuff about Robert mistakenly thinking Julie was having a lesbian affair with one of their co-workers (“I had never shown the slightest desire for a woman in my life”). And whaddya know, Robert has stiffed her on the partnership agreement, giving shares instead to someone to whom he owed money. They break up, he finds another girlfriend and appears to be doing okay, she says. But two years later—in 2008—she learns he has committed suicide.

2:10 p.m. — Chapters 31 & 32, “Kevlar.”

Couillard has launched her own security firm, Integrated Global Solutions (IGS), along with an auto-leasing business with two former colleagues from DRP. Then—surprise!—it turns out one of those trusted partners in the leasing biz is stealing from the company! Yet again, duped by a man she trusted!

Okay, we’re close to Bernier, so I want to quickly address this apparent pathology, expanding on my theories above. My colleague Anne Kingston, who is reading the book as I write this, noted a sense of fantasy that exists alongside Couillard’s gritty struggles to get ahead. Anne raised the 1997 wedding to Sirois, which I made the mistake of skating over. It was an enormous, lavish affair, held at the giant Église Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Montreal. They had the same Rolls limos Céline Dion used in her wedding. Seven course meal, including of all things an ice sculpture on top of an expanse of blue Jell-O. To Anne, this all has the unmistakable feel of Pretty Woman. I have to agree.

And so, an addendum to my theory: Julie has a habit of projecting fanciful expectations onto the men in her life, whether it’s Sylvain the married guy, or the stranger who offers her business opportunities while she’s serving him wine in a bistro. She doesn’t say so in the book, but she seems to expect all of these people to take her on a magic carpet ride. She never takes obvious precautions, and gets crushed. Every time.

Let’s proceed.

Her co-worker, the lesbian, is coming onto her. But she’s not interested, and I have to throw in this choice bit:

“Like many gays and lesbians I had met, Monique believed every person has latent homosexual tendencies. That may be true for some people, but it certainly isn’t in my case.”

So that settles that.

2:20 p.m. — Well, well. We’ve met a fellow in a hotel bar named Philippe Morin. He runs a Quebec City real estate company named Kevlar. He’s married with kids, but at least he’s separated from his wife. One thing leads to another, and then, in an uncharacteristic act of good sense, Couillard actually shuts down the relationship when it becomes clear Philippe hasn’t made a clean break from his wife.

Well, well. We’ve met a fellow in a resto-bar named Bernard Coté. He works for Michael Fortier, the federal Minister of Public Works. Bernard is kind, and interested in her desire to sell real estate in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Wouldn’t it be interesting if these two fellows crossed paths?

Wow, it’s like I’m clairvoyant! One day, when Julie is having a casual drink with Philippe and his biz partner, Coté happens to call her cell phone. Philippe is very, very interested in a call for tenders on some Q.C. lands the feds want to buy to locate a government building.

“Then [Philippe] asked me: ‘How would you like to represent Kevlar in this dossier?’ … ‘It would be great for us to have someone who’s on good terms with a guy like Coté.'”

Couillard is confused and distressed Philippe later disavowed any connection to her. She had signed two separate contracts with them. She had Kevlar business cards with the title “business development officer” on them.

2:50 p.m. — Chapter 33, “Politics.”

We’re in the boggy world of power and influence now. It’s mid-April ’07, and Couillard has run into an old acquaintance, André Turcot, who is active with the Conservative Party, a.k.a. Canada’s New Government. He invites her to a fundraiser Michael Fortier will be attending. She writes a cheque for $1,000 to get in the government’s good graces and (again, I want to weep for the poor woman) it bounces.

But hey, things happen. She presses a lot of Tory flesh that night. By which I mean hands. She likes what she sees. Evidently a bit short of candidates, they ask her to run, and she’s considering it.

Here’s an endorsement you won’t see on a Conservative ad any time soon:

“I was quite inclined to support Stephen Harper. I felt that since he had become prime minister the year before, he had been true to his word—which is not something you can say about a lot of politicians. I also thought that up to then, he had responded quite well to teh need for change that had brought him to power in the first place.”

Oh, and she just got invited to a cinq à sept, meaning happy hour (gawd I love Quebec). And guess who’s going to be there? (Hint: it’s not Luc Lavois)…

3:25 p.m. — Chapter 34, “Meeting Maxime.”

The scene: Cavalli Restaurant in Montreal, about 10 people at the table. Philippe from Kevlar is there, along with his partner René Bellerive. So is Eric Boyko, founder of eFundraising.com, which allows polititcos to bag cash over the web. And Maxime Bernier, of course. Maxime, who is Industry Minister at the time, has just appointed Boyko to the board of the Business Development Bank. Boyko is acting as go-between for Kevlar, which wants to get in good with Max.

Max perches next to Julie, and she begins talking about her newfound political ambitions (which, given the recent spate of candidate implosions, would not have been good for the Tories). She doesn’t want to be lumped in with four other “scantily clad” women at the table Philippe has brought along. It turns out Max has never met Philippe. This was all set up by Boyko, says Couillard, including setting her up with Max.

Ick.

“In fact, I was quite attracted to Maxime, and Maxime seemed to be quite attracted to me. So much so that at one point—perhaps emboldened by the drinks he’d had, or else titillated by the presence of the young ladies Philippe had invited …—he surreptitiously kissed me on the cheek.”

“I don’t mean to sound prudish, but I must say I found him quite forward.”

What, so she’s Liza Bennett now?

Anyway, maybe Bernier saw good political instinct in Couillard. She got all the negatives out early—the biker past, the marriage, the divorce. That night, they go for a drink after dinner at another hotel, exchange co-ordinates and go their separate ways. But he emails the next morning asks her for dinner. That’s when she tells him all the bad stuff.

“It was obvious to me if I became his partner, I would surely be subjected to background checks… if I’m wrong then Canada’s national security is truly jeopardy.”

Max is not visibly taken aback though. On the contrary, she thinks he already knew. One thing leads to another. They wind up back at his hotel room and “what was bound to happen happened.”

Not exactly the earth moving, is it? But I guess when you’ve endured the travails of Michel, Norman, Gilles, Stéphane, Bruno, Sylvain, Robert and Philippe, you get a bit jaded.

Anyway, Max begins having his chauffeur drop him at Julie’s place in Laval whenever he’s back in town. But she is a proud woman, not some booty call. “At my age, I had no time to waste on trivial puppy love.”

3:50 p.m. — Chapters 35 & 36, “Commitment,” & “The Dress.”

A few days later, Max makes his infamous proposition. Be my girlfriend, but there’s a condition. “Even if things go sour between us, you have to officially be my girlfriend for at least a year.”

Hey, business is business. Best part, he wants to do this because the chatterboxes on the Hill are suggesting he’s—gasp!—gay. There is a brief period of bliss, including trips to the Beauce, Quebec City and Aruba. But after six months, she “gives up on love” with Max.

I think you’ve read most of what she’s said about the dress already. She bought it with a shawl to attend a dinner in Quebec City. Max was the one she suggested she wear it with a jacket to his swearing in as Foreign Affairs Minister. Some complaining follows about the press failing to notice other women at the ceremony dresses “far more likely to inspire lustful thoughts” (memo to editor: I’d like to be assigned to the next swearing-in ceremony, please).

Some intrigue about the PMO ordering Max to fire a staffer who allegedly “stood up” to them. And Couillard’s at loggerheads with one of his staffers, whom she is calling Deborah.

I’m not going to try to identify the individuals involved here, although I can make some educated guesses. I will link to this news story that captured a bit of the drama at the time.

4:35 p.m. — Chapter 37, “A Woman Thing.”

I feel right now as if I’ve picked up a different book. Suddenly, Couillard is moving in exalted circles yet there’s no acknowledgment of how this has happened, how her life has changed, how it’s affecting her mentally. It appears as if she’s reach the height she always wanted. Yet the narrative proceeds merrily, as if she always expected to be dating the foreign minister, and the gruelling events of the past three decades never occurred. Weird.

In fact, she’s still on the outside looking in (though there’s no explicit acknowledgment of that in the book). The dastardly Deborah has allegedly robbed her of a chance to accompany Max to an APEC conference in Australia. She said Couillard would have to pay the $125-a-plate if she wanted to attend a fundraiser Max was going to. And on and on. I can only imagine this has Bernier’s former staffers fuming. I also suspect flimsy pseudonyms don’t protect a person from libel actions. I hope Mac & Stew had their fact-checkers on the job.

Anyway, it finally all comes to a head, when Deborah tries to kick Couillard out of a hotel room so Max can have an off-record chat with a reporter:

“I looked at Maxime. He didn’t say a word. By that point I was livid. Either I was going to slap the little bitch, or I was going to leave. I chose option two, but before withdrawing I looked Maxime straight in the eye and told him, quite frankly ‘If you think I’m going to stand by while one of your employees insults me and throws me out of the room, well, you picked the wrong girl, Max.”

Great exit, to hear her tell it. But Max goes and retrieves her, they try to talk it out, and Couillard claims that “Deborah” has a crush on Bernier. Jesus, it’s Peyton Place on the Rideau! Anyway, Deborah allegedly has some sort of breakdown, and that is the end of her tenure.

5 p.m. —Chapter 38, “New York, New York.”

Trip to the Big Apple to a UN assembly opening. Meeting George W. Bush. We all know what the President told Bernier upon clapping eyes on Couillard: “Well, well, well, haven’t you been keeping good company now!” I guess power buys you some licence, because our girl Julie is not offended: “…despite the brevity of our meeting, I was pleasantly surprised by his friendly, easygoing, almost carefree attitude.”

Yes, a lot of us have been surprised by that, though not always pleasantly.

The pictures are here: Julie with the Prez; Julie with Laura Bush; Julie with the Ban Ki-moon’s wife. And man, was she giddy. The last time she lavished detail like this, she was staying in South Beach, getting hit on by Gabriel Byrne. The champagne receptions, the chauffeurs, the security. She loves it, you can tell. Don’t buy the line about being more impressed by “people I met who were involved with various NGOs, or the UN’s various humanitarian organizations.” They get all of a couple of sentences.

She takes some credit for getting Bernier ready for his speech before the UN General Assembly, saying she helped polish his English.

It’s hard to overstate her desire to hurt Bernier. I mean, it’s clear she doesn’t just want to repair her reputation, she wants to wreck his political career. Hell hath no fury and all that. But Couillard goes far beyond depicting the guy as callow. Some bullet points:

• the quote you’ve heard about Bernier’s “surprising intellectual laziness.” I can’t help thinking she herself was a pretty good yardstick for that; there’s not a lot of deep thinking in this book.

• disclosing that he personally opposed the posting of troops to Afghanistan.

• recounting a conversation in which he theorized that Quebec’s independence is “inevitable.”

• the contempt-for-Harper stuff, which have already been well-played in the media. I think Bernier’s thoughts on Harper’s autocratic tendencies are fair game. Same goes for Bernier’s leadership ambitions. But Bernier’s remarks about Harper’s belly? Think of the snide things you’ve said about your boss, or a past boss, to your spouse. Imagine your spouse disclosing those to your boss—and everyone else she could get to listen. As I read it here, it just seems cheap.

5:53 p.m. — Chapter 41, “Paris.”

To hear her tell it Couillard is now regularly providing counsel to Max on how best to further his career, to stop talking trash about the PM and PMO, yadda, yadda. Having a little trouble swallowing that too.

But hey, she finally puts that gay rumour to rest, calling him “the most rabid skirt chaser” she’s ever known. He’s now cheating on her like crazy, including with an unnamed Ottawa journalist (man tongues must be wagging on the Hill right now!).

In Paris, they run into an old flame of Maxime’s, who is now married. He makes an ass of himself at the Canadian ambassador’s residence. Then she catches him pawing the old flame in a corridor. She decides he’s pathologically horny:

“I realized that, basically, what I had thought was a need to charm others—fairly common in a certain type of man but usually harmless—was in fact some sort of uncontrollable illness with Maxime. And now I saw how, even in the course of his official ministerial functions … he wasn’t able to restrain himself.”

So there’s your diagnosis, and in mid-December of 07 she ends it, though she agrees to carry out her end of their one-year pact.

6 p.m. — Chapter 42, “Call for Tenders.”

Uh, not to suggest anything shady, but Couillard has just gone from being an addendum to a firm that wants to sell the government some land in Quebec to jetting off to Dubai and and UAE on a “trade mission,” with Export Development Canada support. Boy, government relations are a lot easier when you’re dating the Foreign Minister.

Here’s where we get a denial she engaged in influence peddling on the Q.C.-Kevlar land deal: “I never asked Maxime for help with regard to Kevlar’s plans for the Quebec City federal building tender. I didn’t expect anything from him.” Indeed she claims he effectively blocked the government from taking Kevlar’s offer, using his position on Treasury Board to stall the process. He did this, she claims, to protect himself from conflict allegations. “If word ever got out that you have a client who’s bidding on a federal government contract, it could be bad for my career,” she quotes him saying.

6:15 p.m. — Chapter 43, “Forgotten Documents.”

Bernier’s supposed offer to Couillard of an IRB position is in here. Not much insight here. She doesn’t say she turned it down, though. And the document thing. Apparently this was just part of Maxime’s callow and cavalier approach to his job.

“I can’t help but smile when I think that, in the eyes of some observers, I supposedly constituted a threat to national security and state secrets! I could have wallpapered my house in confidential documents.”

6:30 p.m. — Chapter 44 & 45, “Panic” & “Alarm.”

A blur of the events after the story of her biker links went public. And a sketchy one at that.

She lay up in her house under a press siege. She called and called. Bernier’s disavowal of knowledge of her past links to the bikers, and the government’s denial of all knowledge of her past, appears to have stung her bad. When the press began sniffing around, you may recall, Maxime’s answer was that he knew nothing about it. Couillard also thinks Bernier knew for two months the Globe was working on the story and didn’t tell her.

Then, when the story broke, he left her to fend for herself. He denied she’d ever seen classified material. Oh, and here are some details to back her well-publicized allegation that some “cleaners” had broken into her house when she wasn’t there, disconnecting her house alarm and removing listening devices. Under the circumstances, it doesn’t seem all that far-fetched.

7 p.m. — Chapters 46, 47: Couillard’s summation

In her own words:

“If, when this whole affair erupted Maxime Bernier had bothered to come and see me—if only to lend me some shred of comfort while my life was fallling apart—I would have covered for him. I would gladly have given him back his damn documents. If he had done something other than wait for three days after I had left him an urgent message, until there were who knows how many other people listening in on our conversation … If he had not simply denied, in the first place, that I had ever had government documents in my possession …”

…

“In light of what has transpired in the ensuing months, I have come to the conclusion that I have let Maxime Bernier off far too easily.”

And in a brief epilogue:

“I had no choice but to write this book.”

That’s her verdict on Bernier. Perhaps this book’s most powerful passages are the ones that make him out to be a narcissistic fool. I would recommend the front half to those intrigued by the woman; I was engaged by it, and often felt sorry for her while reading it. I’d recommend the back half to anyone interested in murky undercurrents of Canadian politics. Just be prepared for a lot of unanswered questions, and remember you’re getting one skewed side of the story.

But what does My Story say about Couillard? I’ve shared some of those thoughts above, and trying to analyze her is probably foolhardy.

Still, some things come through in the text. One is an overwhelming sense of disappointment. Couillard talks a good game about being fiercely independent. But her history of attaching herself to men on whims, thinking they’ll confer some level of social acceptance she lacks, is repetitive, disturbing and undeniable. Her experience with Bernier must have been devastating. He gave all those things to her, when he should have known they couldn’t be hers to keep. Worse, she woke one morning to find herself portrayed before the country—the world, in fact—as “a debauched woman” (her words). Imagine.

It would be too high-blown to call her a modern-day Tess, but the plot trajectory is similar. I didn’t always sympathize with Julie Couillard while reading this book. But insofar as she thirsts for re-appraisal, approval and most of all revenge, I think I can understand her.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/a-liveblog-review-of-my-story-by-julie-couillard/feed/30It’s almost like they’re two different countrieshttp://www.macleans.ca/general/its-almost-like-theyre-two-different-countries/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/its-almost-like-theyre-two-different-countries/#commentsWed, 27 Aug 2008 00:55:57 +0000http://blog.macleans.ca/?p=5831You see a lot of this sort of story, wherein assorted “experts” speculate that a win for Obama in the US election could give the Liberals a lift, Dion and…

]]>You see a lot of this sort of story, wherein assorted “experts” speculate that a win for Obama in the US election could give the Liberals a lift, Dion and Obama being soulmates and all. Larry Martin even has a pollster pegging the Obama effect at 3 percentage points.

There’s just one problem with this thesis: there’s no evidence that American presidential elections have any particular effect on Canadian elections.

The Liberals were somehow able to win in 1968 and 1972, notwithstanding Nixon’s victories in both presidential elections. Nor did Reagan’s big win in 1980 prevent Pierre Trudeau’s triumphant return.

True, the Conservative won back to back elections in 1984 and 1988, while their Republican cousins were doing the same. And Liberal wins in 1993 and 1997 followed Bill Clinton’s victories.

But the Liberals won again in 2000, when George W. Bush took the White House back for Republicans. And again, narrowly, in 2004, notwithstanding Bush’s re-election.

There’s just no pattern here — other than the one that has the Liberals winning most of the time. But you knew that one.